New Exhibition at the Lab Gallery!

Dublin City Council is pleased to announce the launch of a new exhibition at the Lab Gallery. 

‘Formal and Wild Landscapes’ by Fergus Martin can be described as an exhibition of illusions and dreams. It incorporates sculpture, animation, photographic prints and sound projections that connect at an emotional and subliminal level.

Curated by Margarita Cappock from Dublin City Council, the exhibition takes place from 28 May to 4 July 2026. It will be launched at the Lab Gallery on 28 May from 6-8pm by Michelle Fagan, founding director of FKL architects and former President of the RIAI. 

Every aspect of the exhibition, from its commencement in the cube space to the culmination in the upper gallery, provides the viewer with an invisible kinetic experience as the art works ‘ping’ against each other and relate sequentially to what the viewer will encounter next. The animation has as its starting point an idea the artist had for a sculpture in a landscape and has taken on another life in the virtual world – a fantastical version of a pastoral scene.

Fergus Martin notes, “It was sparked by my always seeing hay bales from trains. They always seem mysterious to me scattered over the landscape and make me think of how leprechauns fooled people who wanted their gold by placing rocks or hawthorn trees everywhere. These hay bales appear to have landed from space and sit there day and night in every season.”

Some of the works in this exhibition have featured in a recent exhibition at the magnificent early eighteenth-century Palazzo Birago in Turin in 2025. Visitors now can view these works from an entirely different perspective here in the contemporary setting of the Lab Gallery in Dublin.

***Attached please find images from exhibition***

ENDS