Mark McGreevy: Zona

Mark McGreevy: Zona showcases a compelling new series of drawings and paintings created over the past five years, reflecting the artist’s fascination with sentient landscapes as a repository for materials and ideas – sites which hold their own agency.

Through this new body of work, McGreevy summons a vivid terrain marked by borders, liminal boundaries, implausible structures, and sites resonating with ominous energy. The works guide viewers into an unrecorded zone of edgelands, dumps, burial grounds, and the remnants of a fantastical industrial collapse.

Anchored in an obsessive drawing practice, the imagery unfolds like a storyboard for a volatile and magical realm. From these landscapes, ruins and effluence spill outward, forming a surreal “anti-archaeology.” Rather than unearthing the past, McGreevy’s paintings reveal a landscape erupting into the present, exposing fractured histories and precarious futures.

Infused with the atmospheric intensity of Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, and René Magritte, and echoing the eerie, speculative narratives of Quatermass and the Pit by Nigel Kneale, McGreevy’s work bridges the familiar and the fantastical.

Zona invites us into an “uncanny realm” where imagination, decay, and mystery intersect, offering a profound meditation on the landscapes we navigate and the narratives they conceal.

Biography

Mark McGreevy is a graduate of Ulster University, Belfast. His exhibitions include shows at The MAC, Belfast; VISUAL, Carlow; The F.E. McWilliam Gallery, Banbridge; The Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast; The Lab Gallery, Dublin; Third Space Gallery, Belfast; The Crawford Gallery, Cork; Katzen Art Centre, Washington, DC; The Glucksman, Cork, among others. McGreevy is the recipient of many awards including the Suki Tea Prize, Arts Council of Ireland Bursary Awards, Arts Council NI SIAP and The Freeland’s Foundation. He has been shortlisted for prestigious art prizes such as The AIB Award and BOC Emerging Artist Award and has participated on artist residency programmes at Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, and The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. His work is held many public and private collections.

Co Curated by Dr Louise Wallace and Feargal O’Malley