A quick visit to any one of Gallery X Dublin’s social media accounts would immediately tell them that the new gallery is a home for Irish independent, unsettling, and “inappropriate” art. What they aim to do here is to foster critical thought and challenge societal narratives through art that people can purchase, especially works of art that talk about crucial issues such as the genocide happening in Palestine. By showcasing and marketing artworks that directly address these complex human phenomena, the gallery interacts with both audiences and communities of artists.
It shows audiences artworks that compel them to confront difficult truths, cultivate empathy, and question existing power structures, while showing artists that unlike existing market prejudice, creating work that takes a critical standpoint of the world around them can also be a source of their livelihood. This is why the work that they do is aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Reduced Inequalities.
One of the earliest shows recorded on their website is a 2017 solo show by watercolour artist Conall McCabe titled Serial Killers that was done at their space on South William Street. The exhibition saw McCabe rendering portraits of famous serial killers such as Richard Ramirez and Aileen Wuornos in nauseating colour combinations, “considering the way we imagine such horrifying entities of evil and how they invade our minds with fear and unsettling unease,” wrote blogger Nancy Wilde about the show.
Currently, Gallery X Dublin is showcasing a fundraiser solo exhibition by artist Ellis de Faoite titled Bare Witness, where all artwork, ticket, and catalogue sales proceeds will be donated to the Médécins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders group to assist their humanitarian work in Gaza, Palestine. De Faoite is a multidisciplinary artist who is primarily showing works on paper in the exhibit, works that have been rendered either in pencil, watercolours, or gouache. Her pieces have a surrealist quality to them, where objects and people seem to exist in a plain imagined space, much like those found in paintings by Salvador Dalí and Giorgio de Chirico. However, where Dalí and de Chirico portray wondrous sights of melting clocks and grand architecture, de Faoite portrays harrowing sights of severed hands and images straight out of the Gaza warzone. This juxtaposition can easily be read as de Faoite’s protest of the surreal way in which the genocide of Palestine has been carried out.
In an art market that favors “friendly” and commercial art, Gallery X Dublin is a necessary provocation—a space where discomfort is curated, silence is broken, and art is wielded as both witness and weapon. By championing works that confront genocide, inequality, and systemic violence, the gallery refuses to let aesthetics exist in a vacuum; instead, it insists that art must engage with the world’s most urgent fractures. Whether through Conall McCabe’s unsettling portraits of serial killers or Eilis de Faoite’s haunting testimonies from Gaza, Gallery X Dublin proves that true artistic courage lies not in mere representation, but in mobilization that transforms viewers into participants, empathy into action, and exhibitions into catalysts for a more just and conscious world.
Find out more about Gallery X Dublin and their initiatives on their website www.galleryx.ie or Instagram, @galleryxdublin.