Reginald Gray

Reginald Gray exhibited at The Dublin Painters Gallery from 1949 as a member of The Dublin Atelier. He set up a studio on Lesson Street and came to know Patrick Swift whose work he greatly admired. Gray looked to the figurative realism of both Swift and Lucian Freud who used Swift’s studio on his visits to Dublin. In 1953 he rented rooms in the home of Cecil Ffrench Salkeld. Gray and came to become involved in theatrical circles and began to design theatre sets for the Pike Theatre. His set designs included those for productions like Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow. Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which were highly avant-garde in Ireland at that time. Gray moved to London in 1957. At this time he began to paint in tempera. He became intrigued by the medium after seeing a black and white reproduction in a library book; a 15th-century portrait of Costanza Caetani attributed to Ghirlandaio. He visited the National Gallery to view the painting in the stores. Its reserve and austerity has a profound impact on him. In London he was part of the London School along with artists such as Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and Lucian Freud. He painted in a purposefully naïve figurative style. In 1964 he moved to Paris where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. He was a copy-editor for the Paris edition of The New York Times and made paintings of interviewees like Jacques Brel, Alberto Giacometti, and Jean-Paul Sartre. He then spent several decades working as a fashion photographer. From 1993 he taught painting at the Irish College in Paris. A retrospective of his work was held at UNESCO Paris that year.