Light on the Bog
There is a quality of light in Connemara that painters have been trying to capture for centuries — a light that is simultaneously harsh and tender, that transforms the bog and the mountain and the Atlantic shore into something that seems to exist outside of ordinary time. Gertrude Degenhardt has been painting that light for more than thirty years, and her new exhibition at the Kenny Gallery in Galway — her largest solo show in Ireland to date — demonstrates that her engagement with it has lost none of its intensity or its freshness.
Degenhardt, who was born in Germany but has lived in Connemara since the early 1990s, is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Irish landscape painting. Her work is immediately recognisable: large canvases, often nearly square in format, in which the landscape is rendered with a combination of precise observation and emotional intensity that gives her paintings an almost meditative quality. Standing in front of one of her larger works, you feel not just that you are looking at Connemara, but that you are somehow inside it.
The Exhibition
The new exhibition, titled Atlantic Light: New Paintings 2024-2026, comprises 34 works, all created in the past two years. The paintings range in scale from intimate studies — small canvases that capture a single moment of light on water or a particular quality of cloud — to large-scale works that fill an entire wall and demand to be experienced from a distance before their full complexity becomes apparent.
The exhibition is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, with rooms devoted to different aspects of the Connemara landscape: the bog, the coast, the mountains, the sky. This arrangement allows the viewer to experience the full range of Degenhardt's engagement with the landscape, and to appreciate the way in which her approach to each element has evolved over the two years of the exhibition's making.
Particularly striking are a series of large paintings depicting the bog in different seasons and different lights. In one canvas, the bog is rendered in the warm amber tones of late summer, the heather in full bloom, the sky a deep, saturated blue. In another, the same landscape is shown in the grey-green of a wet November day, the light flat and diffuse, the colours muted but somehow more intense for their restraint. The contrast between the two paintings is a masterclass in the painter's art.
Degenhardt in Her Own Words
"I came to Connemara because I was looking for something," Degenhardt says, speaking in the gallery on the opening day of the exhibition. "I'm not sure I could have told you what it was at the time. But I found it here — in the light, in the landscape, in the silence. I've been trying to paint it ever since."
She describes her working process as intensely physical: long days outdoors, often in difficult weather, making drawings and colour notes before returning to the studio to work on the larger canvases. "The paintings are not made outdoors," she explains. "They're made in the studio, from memory and from feeling. But the memory has to be very precise — you have to have really looked, really paid attention, before you can paint."
A Devoted Following
Degenhardt has built a devoted following among collectors in Ireland, Germany, and the United States, and her work commands significant prices at auction. The Kenny Gallery, which has represented her for more than twenty years, reports that several works in the new exhibition were sold before the opening, and that demand for the remaining pieces is strong.
"Gertrude is one of those rare artists whose work gets better with time," says Kenny Gallery director Conor Kenny. "Every exhibition she gives us is better than the last. This one is the best yet."
The exhibition runs until August 15th and is open to the public free of charge, Monday to Saturday, 9am to 6pm. The Kenny Gallery is located on Middle Street in Galway city centre.
