One of Ireland's most celebrated and talented artists is coming back to Belfast, five years after the Ulster Museum hosted a major retrospective of his work. The Mullan Gallery on Belfast's Lisburn Road is staging an exhibition of Martin Gale's paintings, works on paper and prints. Martin Gale was born in Worcester in England in 1949 but as the son of a steeplechase jockey, he lived in no fewer than 15 homes there and in Ireland in his first 12 years of his life. In the Irish art world, he and many of his contemporaries reacted against the widely-favoured landscape paintings of previous generations and opted instead for abstract expressionism. For Gale, however, his major interest was Pop Art and its exponents such as David Hockney, Larry Rivers and Peter Blake. Yet he recalls even at that time of changing tastes, he maintained a regard for landscape painting. His work is finely painted and detailed. It is often described as being a combination of early 20th century realism and more modern photo-realism. On one level he says the narrative of the work is usually implied or suggested. Gale gives ingredients of the story and leaves the observer to bring their own interpretation.
