THE BRIDE OBSERVED I

Graham Gingles

The Bride Observed I

Mixed media wall sculpture, wood and glass box construction

H 39 cm x W 32 cm x D 19 cm / H 15.35 in x W 12.60 in x D 7.48 in

This artwork is Unique

Certificate of Authenticity included

Every artwork travels protected with the same care with which it was chosen.

Graham Gingles (b. 1943, Larne, Co. Antrim) trained at the Belfast College of Art, Hornsey College of Art and the British School at Rome before beginning, in 1969, the wall-hung boxed constructions for which he has become internationally known. His practice remains almost entirely handmade and intuitive, built without preparatory drawings and rooted in personal memory rather than illustration. He was appointed an Academician of the Royal Ulster Academy in 1986, and his work is held in major public collections including the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Ulster Museum.

The Bride Observed I belongs to a recurring “Bride” motif within Gingles’ practice, a figure held at a careful distance rather than fully revealed, watched rather than possessed. Housed within his characteristic wood and glass box, the piece turns the act of looking itself into the subject: the viewer is cast, quite literally, as the observer implied by the title, invited to study a presence that remains just out of reach behind the glass.

To collect The Bride Observed I is to acquire one of Gingles’ quietly withholding studies of watching and being watched, filtered entirely through his own private, handmade idiom. It is a rare opportunity to own a piece from a practice held in the same institutional company as the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Ulster Museum, one built, as always, by a single pair of hands over months or years.