Despite differences in their style, Yool Kim, Gavin Lynch, and Peter Doyle have all engaged with ideas of memory and communal interaction in their solo exhibitions this past summer at RHODES. Kim has taken an approach focusing on the small details we retain and the collaboration with others, while Lynch and Doyle have instead explored our relationship with the space we're in and how we remember those we shared it with.
Yool Kim – The Way We Were
At RHODES until 26 July 2025, Yool Kim’s The Way We Were invited visitors into a dreamlike setting where human figures melted into their swan counterparts. Kim’s delicate yet detailed brushwork captured these relationships and held them in her fantastical spaces, where decorative motifs met natural forms and abstracted faces. These works created an atmosphere of quiet intimacy, speaking both to shared experiences and to Kim’s own private memories, creating scenes that feel both personal and universal. The contrast between her delicate colour palettes and the occasional layered strokes mirrored the composition’s balance of lightness with intensity, relaxation with connection. It was as though Kim was helping us to remember a past time, with only a few memories in sharp focus and the rest softened by her floral designs.
46 x 35 3/4 in
Gavin Lynch – Passing Through
Gavin Lynch’s Passing Through closed in late June, but its installation presented a unique reimagining of landscape painting. His bold compositions were created by deep shading, vibrant palettes, and pixelated distortions that presented more than just a view of the Scottish mountains. They reflected the nature of his own presence within it, through the paintings based on sketches he took while encountering the landscape in person. Lynch’s work combines memory with evidence, mirroring his approach to art, where he merges painterly techniques with digital tools, resulting in pixelated trees being sprayed by the lightest of waterfalls, and soft clouds in perfect blue skies.
36 x 30 in
Peter Doyle – Public House
Running in the Project Room at the same time as Gavin Lynch’s exhibition, Peter Doyle’s Public House focused on a very different kind of landscape: the liminal space of the pub. Doyle’s work transformed the familiar setting of the local pub into a series exploring communal history, nostalgia, and personal memories. Through his immersive scenes featuring half-finished pints and spontaneous folk musicians, he demonstrated how shared spaces, such as the pub, shape and reflect the identities of the people who inhabit them. The importance of the pub and community for Doyle is tied to his informal beginnings, when a friend offered him a storage space to begin creating art in, over a pint in the pub.
52 x 53 1/8 in
Together, these exhibitions offered three distinct perspectives on how memory and place intertwine. While Kim focuses on the intimate gestures that stay with us, Lynch explores the memory and changeability of our time in nature, and Doyle's work depicts the communal, liminal spaces in which we make those memories.
For more information on any artists mentioned here, please email info@rhodescontemporaryart.com
