09/04/2026
Limerick City Gallery of Art is delighted to present Penti Menti by Sarah Dwyer
The third and final iteration of Dwyer's Irish Institutional Touring Exhibition 2025-2026, opening next week on Saturday 18th April at 2pm with a discussion between Jennifer Higgie and Sarah Dwyer.
Penti Menti brings together new paintings, drawings and ceramic sculpture created specifically for this exhibition, many of them being the largest in the artist’s career to date.
The title refers to the art historical concept of pentimento—from the Italian, pentirsi, “to repent”— which refers to the visible traces of an artist’s revisions within a painting. For Dwyer, these transformations lie at the heart of her practice: painting becomes a process of layering and erasing, of burying and excavating, mirroring how memory and time shape both body and landscape. Her recent work reflects deeply personal experiences: the fragility of the body, personal loss and the persistence of memory. Each trace and echo of a previous stage in the painting becomes an integral part to the sum of its whole. These are felt through rhythm, gesture, and the shifting balance of colour and form.
Her bold palette – electric yellows, luminous pinks and deep marine blues affirm vitality while acknowledging vulnerability. Sharing the same playful defiance, her ceramics embrace risk and resist symmetry. The work has an underlying figurative foundation, which is then fragmented, reconfigured, or partially obscured. Dwyer’s work becomes a site of negotiation between intention and revision, mirroring the psychological or emotional layers of the human experience.
The exhibition is curated by Eamonn Maxwell and supported by an Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon Touring Award and was initiated by Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre and toured to Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda and finishes it tour at Limerick City Gallery of Art running until Sunday 14th June 2026.
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