From the presentation accompanying the artist’s first exhibition at Carl Kostyál in London in spring 2026:

"Carl Kostyál is delighted to present ‘Shane, Come Back’, a presentation of eleven new paintings by the Irish-Japanese artist Shane Keisuke Berkery (b. 1992), marking the artist’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery and in London.

“Shane Keisuke Berkery (b. 1992) is an Irish-Japanese painter who was born in Japan, moved to the USA as a child, then to Ireland, studying at the NCAD in Dublin then later for his MA at the Royal College of Art in London, where he now resides. Such a transnational upbringing, with all the upheaval and radical adjustment to language, culture, social codes and expectations that accompany it, is key to a decoding of his complex pictorial compositions. The only constant in his peripatetic life has been making art. The central preoccupation in his practice is his clear sense that identity, far from being something fixed or culturally singular, is contingent, and requires continual negotiation.

His paintings teeter on the threshold of internal and external worlds, of lived reality and its narration, of stability and instability, both of memory and of the picture plane itself. Personal memory and collective myth collide. For the artist, consciousness and memory are not linear. The mind does not store experience in neat sequences but in fragments – photographs, films, inherited images and stories, historical events learned, private memories recalled – all co-exist simultaneously. These fragments, drawn equally from his life and from what the artist has described as ‘the constant flow of mediated images’ become in his paintings reference points through which the self is understood and projected. His works are not depictions of scenes so much as constructions of psychic space, compressed environments in which multiple temporalities and image registers collide.

For his debut exhibition with the gallery, the artist has anchored many of the paintings in the architectural context of the gallery space itself, specifically ‘Miles City Saloon’, ‘Feather in the Cap’, ‘Post-War Painter and Dog’, ‘Meridian Drive’ and ‘The Hang’, creating a circular and dizzying trompe l’oeil effect for the show’s duration. The gallery space and its distinctive specificity (a Georgian former townhouse in Mayfair) is scrutinised as both the public site for these works’ display and as a private, looming spatial and emotional preoccupation. Rather than neatly containing the subjects of each work, the exhibition space itself becomes a metaphysical site of accumulation, co-opted into the kaleidoscope of the artist’s mind, alongside myriad art historical, filmic and personal references.
[...]
Recent solo exhibitions ’Tasting the Menu’, Molesworth Gallery, Dublin (2022); ‘Cave Paintings’, Molesworth Gallery, Dublin (2020), ‘Figures’, Contra Galleries, New York (2019), ‘Contemporary Paintings’, Molesworth Gallery, Dublin, (2018). Recent group exhibitions include Frieze LA, Southern Guild, Los Angeles (2026); ‘Unstable Grounds’, Kearsey & Gold, London (2025); ‘Ways of Seeing’, HDM Gallery, Paris (2025); ‘Birds of a Feather’, Chilli, London (2025); ‘Through Closed Eyes, Darkly’, Belenius, Stockholm (2025); ‘A Gesture, A Room, A Memory’, Ames Yavuz, Singapore (2025).
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