About

Peter Smyth is a contemporary Irish painter based in County Kildare. His practice explores the intersection of biology, technology, and painting, drawing on natural structures, computer-rendered forms, and the tactile language of paint to investigate systems of exchange. Smyth creates highly constructed works rooted in digital renders that use the morphological traits of plants—particularly those linked to biopiracy or ecological tension—as a generative starting point.

His works have been exhibited across Ireland and Europe, and are held in private collections internationally, including in Australia, Cambodia, and Alaska.

Artist Statement

Peter Smyth’s paintings emerge from a layered engagement with ecological forms, digital media, and the materiality of painting. His earlier body of work, Mutualisms (2022), focused on systems of cooperation, referencing the underground exchanges within fungal networks and the so-called “wood wide web.” These paintings explored how ecological interdependence could be mirrored in the relationship between digital rendering and the physical painting process.

His more recent work marks a shift in thinking—from mutualism toward asymmetry. This is informed by the concept of source and sink in ecology: one system gives, the other accumulates. In Smyth’s practice, the digital render becomes the source—a space of speed, generation, and iteration—while the painting becomes the sink, absorbing time, attention, and physical presence.

Using hard-edged gradients, extruded forms, and overlapping planes, Smyth constructs compositions that draw from plant morphology—leaves, nodes, buds—traced from online databases and refracted through speculative visual systems. These references often stem from plants connected to histories of extraction or biopiracy, reimagined here not as scientific illustration, but as aesthetic environments of contradiction and transformation.

What might appear pristine or digital at first glance reveals surface disruption on closer inspection: lifted tape, brushwork, shifting light. The works balance harmony and dissonance, offering not resolution but layered perception—inviting the viewer to consider what is gained, and what is left behind, in systems of exchange.

Selected Exhibitions

2025
Mix – Kirk Gallery – Group Exhibition
May–June 2025, Denmark

2024
Triumvirate – Smock Alley Theatre (Scene + Heard Festival) – Group Exhibition
February 2024, Temple Bar, Dublin

Do You Dream? – The Space Between – Group Exhibition
July–August 2024, 28 Fenian St, Dublin 2

Outset Xmas Open – Outset Gallery – Group Exhibition
December 2024, Comstore, Unit 14 + 15, Middle St, Galway

2023
Winter Exhibition – Kirk Gallery – Group Exhibition
December 2023, Denmark

Páipéar – Hang Tough Contemporary – Group Exhibition
July–August 2023, 6–8 College Green, Temple Bar, Dublin

2022
Mutualisms – Atelier Now Gallery – Solo Exhibition
March–April 2022, Block 3, Charlemont St, Saint Kevin’s, Dublin

Familia – Atelier Now Gallery – Group Exhibition
December 2022, Block 3, Charlemont St, Saint Kevin’s, Dublin

Rising – Hang Tough Contemporary – Group Exhibition
September 2022, 25 Lennox St, Portobello, Dublin