Oisín Tozer

Breathing in the Dark Solo Exhibition

May 22 - July 3 2026

Green On Red Gallery is very proud to announce Breathing in the Dark, Oisín Tozer's first solo exhibition in the gallery, running until July 3, 2026. 

Breathing in the Dark is a new, site-responsive body of work, consisting of large-scale imagery and a series of sculptural interventions. The artworks respond to the vacant patch of land located beside the gallery.  They implicate subjects, materials and research from the site and its ecology, as part of a broader engagement with light, materiality and time. 

The exhibition features a new large carving of the invasive weed Buddleia. Buddleia's history is addressed through the conceptual device of carving, pointing to the plant's entanglement with human activity.

Other artworks consider buddleia's ecological impact — specifically how its shadow suppresses the growth of neighbouring plants.  Buddleia’s growth at the expense of the surrounding vegetation reflects the artist’s interest in French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who write about the pathological tendancy of fascism as something which occurs across times and species. By drawing a parallel between this and the behaviour of the plant, the artist contradicts ideas of nature as something pure, stable or separate from human culture.

Light and time are present throughout Tozer’s work. Elements decay, play on a loop or are activated by passing sunlight.  Suspended from the ceiling like a pendulum, a sleek matte screen depicts footage of a buddleia plant's shadow, which is obscured by a pale green washi sheet soaked in light-sensitive chlorophyll.  Light is equally central to new works made from broken and reassembled glass, where the act of shattering the material reveals latent organic forms within. 

Breathing in the Dark also brings us back in time to moments in art history; to Robert Smithson’s and Nancy Holt’s site/non-site works, to Fred Sandback’s vertical constructions and, to further counter the Western attitudes to time and space, figures within the Japanese Mono-ha movement, such as Kishio Suga and South Korean artist Lee Ufan.  

This exhibition is a poetic response to site that speaks to the beauty of the natural world while gesturing to the darkness of our current ecological moment.

On Saturday, 13  June, 1 – 2 pm, Oisín Tozer will be in conversation with Niamh Darling, Assistant Curator, 2026 Venice Biennale and at The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin.