Pure Gold

VISUAL is pleased to present Pure Gold, an exhibition of new work by Niamh O’Malley, encompassing sculpture, moving image, drawing, and installation. 

The genesis of Pure Gold lies in the Irish Life Centre, a modernist housing, office and retail complex in the centre of Dublin. Commissioned as headquarters for Irish Life Assurance Company and designed by RKD Architects, it was built in stages between 1974 and 1985, and was considered pioneering in its ambition and scope to be a “city within the city”. 

The complex’s solar-reflecting windows were produced by laminating a layer of gold between two sheets of glass, reflecting the rays of the sun into the city, and around the centre’s towers, plazas and courtyards. The title Pure Gold is drawn from a description of this glass in early press coverage of the building in the Irish Times. This elemental part of the original design has recently been partially replaced with high efficiency blue/green tinted glass in line with contemporary environmental building standards, and in the process altered our experience of this building. 

O’Malley has taken the reclaimed gold glass, with all its lure and promise, and presented it here as a shifting sliver of silica and metal. Where the glass once reflected the sun, now it shelters and filters artificial light. From a corporate, public setting to encompassing a hallmark of domesticity, the glass translates the language of Modernism into the standard lamp. In various abstract and ambiguously figurative forms throughout Pure Gold, the glass reflects, refracts, and variously appears gold, green, or almost black; something to look through, but also to look at and on, and to see oneself reflected back, a viewer. 

The figure of the viewer corresponds with fleeting glimpses of other figures who appear, disappear and morph into abstracted, otherworldly shapes in Film (2026). This looping moving-image work was created in O’Malley’s studio in the Irish Life Centre, filmed sporadically over the course of a year through the privacy-filmed glass that separates the studio from the busy tram platform directly outside. The artist, and subsequently the viewer, becomes an accidental voyeur of city life, unnoticed and unacknowledged by bodies caught in the suspended act of social waiting. The slump of the shoulders and drawn-down head of many of the figures remind us of the tension of looking at and through, a collective gaze – we watch the screen, they, their phones. 

A new series of graphite Panels (2026) continues O’Malley’s ongoing series of drawings that produce and obliterate images through the tracery of mark-making. Voids of colour and depth in a room of flashes and glimpses, they offer the viewer the indisputable physical surface of the object, no stuttering image, no malleability. They bear every trace of their making and act as a record of touch; stone slabs of pure mark-making, alongside their glass and steel counterparts of stark modernity. 

Pure Gold can be understood as a description of material, of allure, but also an experience; the value and valuableness of looking, of seeing and being seen, refracting and reflecting.

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Niamh O’Malley is a visual artist working with moving image alongside sculptural materials including glass, wood, metal and stone. Through objects and recorded fragments, she hopes to produce material and physical gestures that revive and reanimate a form, an architecture, or a moment.  O’Malley represented Ireland at La Biennale di Venezia, 2022 and recent solo exhibitions include Space of Time, Beijing (2026), Artopia Gallery, Milan, Vardaxoglou Gallery, London (2025, 2023), Grimm, New York, (2024), Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2023), Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin (2023) The Model, Sligo (2023), John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (2021), mother’s tankstation, Dublin (2020), Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2019), Lismore Castle Arts (2019), Grazer Kunstverein (2018), Bluecoat, Liverpool (2015), the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2017, 2015).  

Sincere thanks to the many people and organisations who have contributed to and supported this project especially Cahir McNicholl, Harry Copas, Michael Higgins, Ellen Rowley, Carole Pollard, Cliodhna Shaffrey, Michael Hill, Gillian Fitzgibbon, Audrey Keegan, Robert Lally, Liam Keighery, David Ranson, Eoin O’Sullivan, Jenny Brady, Flan Hedderman, Rowan O’Malley Dennett and Toby Dennett. The staff of VISUAL, The Irish Life Centre, Fire station Artists’ Studios, Visual Artists Ireland, The Ballinglen Arts Foundation