Offaly artist Christor unveils major solo show in home town
Birr exhibition runs all summer and through Birr Vintage Week & Arts Festival
BIRR artist Christor returns to his home town this summer with ‘Catastrophe’, a major solo exhibition of new paintings opening at Birr Theatre & Arts Centre.
The show runs from June 22nd to August 31st 2026, taking the main exhibition spot for the ten days of Birr Vintage Week & Arts Festival (July 31st to August 7th), with an official opening on Saturday June 27th.
Christor, who was born in 2003, is an emerging multi-disciplinary artist working across painting, film and digital print. ‘Catastrophe’ brings together a body of bold, graphic paintings that stem from the quiet fascination with disaster at every scale, from deeply personal struggle to the human capacity for self-destruction, rendered in a striking, pared-back palette of red, blue, black and white.
The work draws on the visual language of diagrams, maps, signs and found imagery, echoing pop-art but updated for a generation navigating an entirely new cultural landscape. Christor's distinctive limited palette has an unusual origin: after discovering a colour deficiency in his own vision, he chose a specific set of colours he could rely on, turning a perceived weakness into the signature of his work.
“The goal of my work is to foster empathy in the viewer whilst also challenging expectations of content and context. These paintings are born of a desire to understand the world and, by extension, for people to understand each other better. I hope to leave people more emotionally engaged, aware, and open to the world around them.”
Catastrophe is a homecoming for one of Offaly's emerging alternative voices.
The exhibition is free to attend during Birr Theatre & Arts Centre's opening hours.