Patrick Redmond

About the artist

Patrick Redmond was born in Dublin in 1976. He studied at IADT and graduated in 1999. He has participated in group and solo exhibitions both nationally and abroad, notably in Seen Not Heard, Crawford Gallery, Cork, 2019 and Here/There in Wexford Art Centre, 2019 as well as a solo exhibition in the RHA in 2020. Redmond lives and works near Gorey in Co. Wexford

His earliest work was representational, consisting of hyper-realistic paintings in oil that challenged comfortable, familiar imagery. In 2018 his work experienced a significant shift, rejecting his former approach in favour of an evolving, often subversive, painting practice, which has shifted from oil portraiture to incorporating mixed media like collage, plaster, soot, and mirrors.

About the exhibition

In this new work, a series of small head-and-shoulder portraits bring together the polished glamour of 1940s film actors and the unsettling features of ventriloquist dummies. Painted in monochrome, the works evoke classic studio publicity stills while quietly undoing their promise of charm and control.

Familiar faces become strange: fixed smiles, hollowed eyes, and subtly artificial expressions introduce an uncanny tension. The archetype of the 1940s actor represents an early model of the constructed public self—carefully lit, styled, and shaped by powerful systems of image-making. The paintings reference archival photography and memory, emphasizing surface, contrast, and mediation. They are not portraits of individuals, but of images already distanced from lived experience. The addition of ventriloquist dummy features makes this distance explicit, turning metaphor into form.

For Redmond, ventriloquism displaces voice and agency: the dummy appears animated while another entity speaks through it. This dynamic resonates strongly with contemporary life, in which identities are increasingly performed through curated images, avatars, and scripted personas. The frozen smile suggests the pressures of visibility and the expectation of constant presentation, where complexity and ambiguity are smoothed away.

By collapsing Hollywood’s past with present-day anxieties about authenticity and control, the series suggests that the performance of identity has not diminished but intensified. These portraits ask who is truly speaking today, and whether the selves we present are animated from within or expertly operated from elsewhere.