Mark Joyce

Wandering Star Solo Exhibition

11 April - 15 May 2026

Green On Red Gallery is proud to announce a new solo exhibition by Mark Joyce. The ' wandering ' in the exhibition title is a reference to the physics of light and celestial mechanics.  It is also a nod to his artistic journey over the decades through the indeterminacy of painting. Joyce uses an arc motif, an elemental unit of human invention and expression with oblique reference to early human structures, to manuscripts and notations or, as the artist likes to say, to ‘ stuff holding stuff up ’. 

These works set out with a procedural rigour. However, motifs that appear stable go through repetition and variation, modest but consequential, becoming out of kilter. From a rhythmic and mechanical foundation, a bending of the light, familiar like the rings of Saturn - or the passing lights on the nearby orbital motorway - the errors accumulate, an entropic unspooling, fragmenting towards chaos and disorder.   

We are reminded of John Gayer's response to Joyce's Newtonians ( 2009 ) Green On Red Gallery exhibition of new paintings where he describes how Joyce " steps up the chromatic intensity with three sets of monochromatic oils that recall the scientists's accordance of musical divisions to the colours of the spectrum. These paintings pulse across the walls... each panel can be read as a note and each set of panels as a chord.... Sound and colour parry off each other to sonorous effect that encourages us to contemplate parallels between music and art. "  ( " Mark Joyce The Newtonians  Ciarán Murphy March ", Circa Art Magazine, Issue 127, Spring 2009,  pp. 102-104. ) 

" Cassini " refers to Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625–1712), an Italian astronomer who made pioneering observations of Saturn.  More recently, NASA's Cassini-Huygens spacecraft spent 7 years reaching and 13 years orbiting Saturn, landing on Titan, its largest moon, before crashing into its atmosphere in a Grande Finale.                                                                                 

“ These new works were painted in my studio at Broom Bridge on the Royal Canal in Dublin, Ireland, where, in 1843, William Rowan Hamilton scratched his Quaternion formulas into the stone of the bridge, laying the foundations for the new celestial mechanics and chaos theory. ”   Joyce ( 2026 )

Mark Joyce is an artist and educator based in Dublin whose practice is characterized by an ongoing inquiry into the physical nature of light and the materiality of pigment. He studied at the Royal College of Art, London, and has held solo exhibitions in Ireland, the UK, and the USA. He has been a Professor of Practice in Yale University and the National University of Singapore, Visiting Professor at Kyoto City University of the Arts, and Erasmus Mundus Visiting Fellow in the University of Arts, Helsinki, and is currently a lecturer at IADT in Dublin. His work is represented in public collections, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Arts Council of Ireland/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

The Irish Times latest review on Joyce’s show:

29 April 2025

In Wandering Star, the artist Mark Joyce maps arcs with the patience of a navigator. Control is essential to the works, yet the painter manages this without the rigidity of so much geometric or op art

Mark Joyce: Wandering Star - Green on Red Gallery, Dublin

★★★★☆

In The Emigrants, his novel from 1996, WG Sebald tells of a character who “described a gentle arc with a goose wing in the darkening air”. It’s a delightfully old-fashioned usage: “to describe” was the precise Middle English term for tracing or delineating a curve.

It is something of a shame that the word no longer carries this particular currency, as there is certainly no richer way of characterising Mark Joyce’s latest painting show than to say it is devoted to describing arcs, following their flow and mapping their interactions with the patience of a navigator or an astronomer.

In Wandering Star, over 14 works of acrylic on raw linen, Joyce uses a reduced vocabulary of arcs arranged in blocks or groupings abutting each other. From a distance the groupings give each canvas a fractured, almost collaged feel. Up close, the artist’s initial outline drawings are faintly visible, as is the raw canvas that asserts itself here and there, highlighting the bands of colour, both features emphasising the gestural control at play in the laying down of the curves.

Like much art that consists of colour lines in this manner – one might think of Bridget Riley or Tomma Abts – the control is essential. Yet the works do not have the rigidity of so much geometric or op art. Joyce’s brushwork in this regard is more akin to the kind of inquisitive calligraphic flow seen in the meandering lines of Brice Marden’s late Asian-influenced paintings.

What is particularly absorbing about the paintings here is the manner in which the arcs and bands of colour subtly register the idiosyncrasies and imperfections of their neighbouring lines.

In Wandering Star 2 a pair of small bumps disturbing one smooth sweep of red are then carefully incorporated into the orange line that sits beside it, the two colours gently spooning into each other like a sleeping couple.

Similarly, in Cassini 7 the jagged edge of an otherwise gently curving dark blue creates a ripple that reverberates through the stripes of light blue, teal, navy and grey until it dissipates at the feet of another broad band of arcs that dominate the left-hand side of the canvas.

As references to Cassini – be that the 17th-century astronomer or the space probe – suggest, there are clear evocations of the rings of Saturn within this series of canvases. But just as strong, for this viewer at least, is the resonance between Joyce’s motifs here and those found in Neolithic rock art such as the clusters of curves and arcs etched into the kerbstones of Brú na Bóinne or the orthostats of Gavrinis, in Brittany.

Such is the potency of those ancient forms, and such is their confident, deliberate execution here, that despite this long and august lineage Joyce’s paintings display a clarity and vitality that feel compellingly fresh and new.

Wandering Star is at Green on Red, Dublin, until Friday, May 15th; on Wednesday, May 13th, at 7pm, the composer Fergal Dowling and the guitarist Shane Latimer will present a live musical event as a response to the paintings after an artist’s talk in the gallery.