The Gun Emplacement

Kerlin Gallery, Anne’s Lane, South Anne St, Dublin Until May 30 01-6709093

Manchester-born Paul Winstanley has built up a significant following with his meticulously-made though obstinately unshowy paintings. Much like Gerhard Richter’s, they begin by accepting photography as a fact of life and as a dominant visual form. Winstanley’s paintings are photographic in their smooth, seamless surfaces and their optical effects, though they situate themselves within the traditional painterly genres of the still life, the interior and the landscape.

He has been drawn to spaces charged with a hint of unease or on occasion ennui – waiting or meeting rooms, lounges, corridors. They are modern in a universal, non site-specific way, mostly uninhabited but not invariably. Stretches of conifer forest have featured as landscapes. Now he has turned to the sea which, he says, has fascinated him since childhood, in a series of works that should strike chords with almost everyone, recalling the mixture of excitement and, incongruously, melancholy that contact with such a primal setting engenders.

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