Owain Train McGilvary

20.04 – 10.05.25
20 Albert Road

Opening, Saturday 19th April, 4–6pm

Publication launch, Saturday 10th May

Open Saturdays, 12–4pm and by appointment.

Batman! is an exhibition of new paintings by Owain Train McGilvary. This series –– presented within an installation of everyday debris relating to the studio or the dancefloor –– is a point of reflection within a larger body of work and research into homosocial imagery, stemming from amateur photography from North Wales’ only gay bar and absences from Cardiff’s museum archives. Over the last four years, McGilvary has been engaging in various collaborative endeavours with his peers to re-assemble the various formal and informal archival materials into multimedia installations.

These archival remnants have also become visual material for his paintings, within which to create new narratives –– pushed up and layered over gay iconography from popular culture, comic books, fanfiction and internet searches, particularly regurgitating and fracturing paintings of the Welsh mining community by Jack Crabtree. These paintings hold a dense pictorial landscape which seek to reinterpret an idea of a collective (and personal/individual) specifically Welsh gay identity.

The exhibition also marks the publication of Coronau. Charting McGilvary’s research over the past four years into The Threes Crowns, north Wales’ only gar bar which closed due to an arson attack in 2014, Coronau includes drawings, collages and filmstills by McGilvary, as well as texts by Adrian Howard and Marcus Jack.

Owain Train McGilvary is an artist from Ynys Môn. He usually works with artist’s video, drawing, collage and painting. His projects pay particularly close attention to cross-disciplinary collaborations and reconfiguring existing archives. Previously he has worked with wrestlers, drag artists, musicians, writers and other visual artists to create multimedia, multilingual and multi-imaginative works.

Recent exhibitions include I’m attended as a portal myself with Bobbi Cameron for Glasgow International, Seeing Red at Pontio Arts Centre and Fel gwacter with Dylan Huw at Mostyn Gallery (all in 2024). In 2022-2023 he was a Wales Venice 10 Fellow supported by Arts Council Wales, Artes Mundi and DAC. He holds an MFA from The Glasgow School of Art and a BA(Hons) in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins. Between September - December he will undertake the Creative Wales Fellowship at The British School at Rome, looking to compare the comic book world of RanXerox with Giorgio De Chirico’s metaphysical paintings.