Pascal Ungerer: Gloomy landscapes born of artist's upbringing in West Cork 

While he has an artistic pedigree thanks to his famous father, Ungerer has been on a creative roll since graduating from the Crawford and Goldsmiths at a relatively late age

Pascal Ungerer recently opened an exhibition in Cork. 

Pascal Ungerer’s exhibition of paintings, Ghosts of Babylon, is now open at the LHQ Gallery at Cork County Library. Ungerer, who lives between Cork city and his native West Cork, began working on the paintings during a residency at Uillinn Art Centre in Skibbereen in 2020, and developed them further over the past year while on a residency at Backwater Studios in Cork.

The paintings are landscapes, though they engage more with the gloom and eeriness of the Irish countryside than with the lyrical beauty favoured by so many Irish artists. “What I’m interested in are marginal places, desolate spaces and hinterlands,” says Ungerer. “We don’t really have the kind of industrial landscapes in West Cork that exist in other countries, but my work is inspired by those dystopic, empty landscapes we do have here, where you have just a few telephone poles, and it’s devoid of people.”