Image: Butler Gallery, Dublin
Butler Gallery in Kilkenny will host three free talks in September examining the work and lives of artists Tony O’Malley and Jane O’Malley. The programme accompanies ‘Tony & Jane O’Malley: The Shared Studio’, a building-wide exhibition running at the gallery from 8 August to 26 October 2026, presented in association with Kilkenny Arts Festival.
The series opens on 3 September with art historian and curator Catherine Marshall, whose talk is titled ‘Tony and Jane O’Malley: The exotic in plain sight’. Taking place from 6pm to 7pm at the Butler Gallery Learning Centre, the event will consider Tony O’Malley’s search for identity in landscape and history, and the significance of the places he and Jane encountered during their shared life and travels.
The talk’s stated focus includes the Bahamas, Clare Island, rural Kilkenny and St Ives in Cornwall, as well as the artists’ home at Physicianstown, outside Callan. Marshall’s account will also address Tony O’Malley’s emergence in Irish art during the early 1980s, when he was nearly 70 years old. Her connection with the artists developed through her work at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, where she curated exhibitions of Tony’s work and accompanied Jane on curatorial research trips to their former studio in St Ives.
On 10 September, Dr Michael Waldron, Curator of Collections and Special Projects at Crawford Art Gallery, will present ‘Tony O’Malley: Work from the Sixties revisited’. The talk will take place from 6pm to 7pm at Butler Gallery. Waldron will revisit ‘Work from the Sixties’, a 1992 Butler Gallery exhibition of works made by O’Malley during the 1960s, when he was based in St Ives, Cornwall, before meeting Jane Harris. The exhibition subsequently travelled to several venues in Ireland, including Crawford Art Gallery and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Waldron’s talk will address O’Malley’s experimentation with materials and the sequence of paintings made in memory of his friend, artist Peter Lanyon. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish visual art, and his curatorial work at Crawford Art Gallery has included exhibitions such as ‘Recasting Canova’, ‘Laura Fitzgerald: I have made a place’ and ‘Harry Clarke: Bad Romance’.
The final event, on 24 September, will be led by Trinity College Dublin MPhil students Annie Collins and Johnny O’Grady. ‘Memories Through Landscape and Dwelling’ will run from 6pm to 7pm at the Butler Gallery Learning Centre. Drawing on research for their postgraduate dissertations and visits to the O’Malley house, archive and studio in Physicianstown, the speakers will explore memory in relation to the artists’ lives and practices. Collins will focus on Jane’s decorative work in the Physicianstown house and garden, examining its motifs, materials and relationship to domestic and professional life.
‘The Shared Studio’ brings together work by both artists across different media and periods, while reconstructing elements of their working environment. The exhibition includes the artists’ worktables, preserved as they were, Jane’s loom with a partially completed tapestry, selected objects from their self-curated shelves and an interactive virtual tour of their studio. The talks are free and ticketed individually, with events held on 3, 10 and 24 September 2026.
