Ailbhe Ní Bhriain at Andréhn-Schiptjenko Paris: Paris
Andréhn-Schiptjenko has the pleasure of announcing Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, taking place in our Paris location. The opening takes place in the presence of the artist, on Saturday 31 January between 6-8 pm.
Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s practice is concerned with how histories are constructed, mediated and transmitted through images, objects and institutions. Working across film, photomontage, CGI, tapestry and installation, she creates layered visual environments that draw on archival material, historical photography, museum displays and sites of architectural or environmental ruin. Ní Bhriain’s work is marked by an associative use of narrative and a meticulously crafted visual language that verges on the surreal. She sidesteps directive positions and familiar binaries, exposing instead the layers of ambiguity and contradiction embedded in fraught issues.
Across this body of work, Ní Bhriain uses found imagery—often anonymous, fragmentary, or historically charged. Jacquard tapestries, woven in combinations of silk, wool, cotton, and Lurex, feature archival portraits drawn from diverse sources and cultures. In each case, the recognisable portrait is interrupted, overlaid variously with excavated landscapes, geological formations and contemporary ruins. These hybrid images feel both ancient and futuristic, placing the human figure within colliding narratives of historical and ecological collapse.
Large photographic diptychs extend this sense of unstable representation. Mountain forms, typically symbols of permanence and transcendence, appear instead as fabricated and uncertain. Image pairings and framing choices underscore a visual language that is at once constructed and speculative.
In smaller works, Ní Bhriain partially obscures found photographs with bitumen or acrylic paint. These interventions recall acts of redaction or decay. What remains visible gains new intensity, while the concealed areas suggest histories that have been lost, overlooked, or deliberately erased.
Taken together, these works reveal images as unstable sites shaped as much by absence as by what endures. Ní Bhriain invites viewers to consider collective memory not as a fixed record but as something defined by gaps, ruptures, and silences. Her works operate as palimpsests in which past and present collapse into one another, revealing the instability of memory and the politics embedded in acts of representation.
Ailbhe Ní Bhriain received a BA from the Crawford College of Art, Cork, an MA from the Royal College of Art, London and a PhD from Kingston University, UK. Her work has been exhibited widely at venues including Broad Art Museum, Michigan; the 16th Lyon Biennale, France; Gagosian–Deitch Projects, Miami; Irish Museum of Moden Art, Dublin; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.
Recent projects in 2024 and 2025 include solo exhibitions at Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford; and Kunsthal Gent, Belgium, alongside group presentations at MAC Lyon, France; Innsbruck International Biennial, Austria; Lahore Biennale, Pakistan; Ulster Museum, Northern Ireland, and Lagos Photo Festival, Nigeria, among others.
Her work is held in major private and public collections such as Dallas Museum of Art, MAC Lyon, The Arts Council of Ireland, Trinity College, Dublin Office of Public Works, Cork Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin Ulster Museum, Belfast and others.
