GINGLES & GINGLES: CONVERSATIONS

There are conversations that need no words. Between Graham and Lisa Gingles there is one such conversation: a dialogue made of images, impossible creatures, masks, memories and small fragments of worlds that seem to belong to a dream. Their works share a fascination with the strange and the ambiguous, with what hides behind appearances, and with the stories that begin precisely where the obvious ends.

Two Generations, One Shared Fascination with the Strange

Graham Gingles and Lisa Gingles share more than a surname and a family bond: they share a deep curiosity for the strange, the symbolic, and everything hidden beneath the surface of things. Father and daughter build, from different generations and different visual languages, worlds charged with mystery, memory and imagination.

Graham Gingles, an Irish artist born in 1943 and a member of the Royal Ulster Academy, is known for a multidisciplinary practice in which painting, drawing and sculpture combine to create objects and scenes of a distinctly narrative and symbolic character. Part of his work belongs to collections such as that of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA).

Lisa Gingles, born in Northern Ireland in 1974 and based in Valencia since 1998, likewise develops a practice that moves between drawing, collage and sculpture. Her hybrid figures, faceless characters and dreamlike landscapes draw on mythology, folklore, travel and memory, building a territory where the human and the fantastical coexist.

From Boxed Worlds to Hybrid Creatures

In Graham’s universe, objects become stage sets and sculptures become small theatres inhabited by characters, symbols and enigmas. Lisa, from a different sensibility, picks up that same taste for the fantastical and transforms it into hybrid figures, masks and beings that seem to have arrived from an old tale, suspended between the human and the animal, between reality and imagination.

Together they build a territory without precise borders — a place where the familiar can become unsettling, and the strange, unexpectedly close.

An Inheritance That Is a Continuous Conversation

Conversations was born from that encounter. It does not seek to draw a line between father and daughter, nor merely to find similarities between their works, but to observe what happens when two imaginations meet — a visual conversation between two generations, two sensibilities, and two ways of looking at the world.

Masks, creatures, memories, symbols and small stories open to interpretation appear throughout their works — images that seem to belong to a familiar territory and, at the same time, to something entirely strange. Works that offer no closed answers, but instead invite the viewer to complete the story.

Conversations speaks of an inheritance that is not necessarily a transmission, but an ongoing conversation — of images that pass from one generation to another, transform, and find new ways to exist. Of what we share without knowing it, and of what, in transforming, ends up becoming entirely our own.

Gingles & Gingles: Conversations is, ultimately, an artistic and family conversation that continues through time — a conversation made of images, memories, mysteries and possible worlds.

Perhaps that is why their works seem to look at each other, as if Graham and Lisa had spent years speaking, in silence, through them.