As part of this year’s highly anticipated Culture Night, the city’s burgeoning art collective First Day Gallery will be curating a pop-up art gallery in the Guinness Storehouse.

With the hope of unlocking the potential of creatives during a time of uncertainty, Guinness partnered with the Creatives Against Covid-19 campaign and ran the SOON IS NOW Exhibition inside the Storehouse last Summer. The exhibition provided a space for hundreds of artists to present their work, during a time when traditional shows were impossible.

Since reopening in July, the Guinness Storehouse has been offering a platform for culture to thrive with Canvas D8. Now, the Storehouse are providing a space for some of Ireland’s leading visual artists to showcase the work that they produced during the pandemic.

Partnering with First Day Gallery [FDG] the recent works of Ciana Fitzgerald, Michelle Malone, Matthew Stickland, Farouk Alao, Seán Whelan Dempsey, Niall KJ Cullen and more, will be shown on the second floor of the historic Guinness Storehouse building, in the Arrol Suite.

A range of painting, sculpture, print, photography and conceptual installations will be collocated and arranged by the founders of FDG Robyn Carey and Neil Dunne.

The exhibition will be opening on Friday, September 17, and will be on view for the following week until September 23 for all visitors to the Guinness Storehouse.

For those that missed the free Culture Night tickets, the Guinness Storehouse will be offering a 20% discount code (FIRSTDAYGALLERY ) for those wishing to access the gallery (here).

Launched in 2021, FDG is an artist-run platform that aims to create space for artists to showcase their work. This rethinking of creative space led the collective to take over a dormant shop space on Aungier Street in June and retrofit it into a gallery space.

Through creating exhibition spaces in non-traditional settings, the group aims to create opportunities for emerging artists and to give them a platform through progressive means.

“We want to curate fresh art experiences that showcase the wealth of talent in visual arts in Ireland,” representatives from FDG have said, adding that “an inclusive and accessible atmosphere,” is important to their ethos.

Choosing artists solely on their work, FDG has deliberately helped to promote a mix of creatives from established artists to recent graduates, students and self-taught artists.

This mix of artists has led to a dynamic exhibition experience, and the upshot of this means that newer artists stand to gain genuine exposure.

Representatives from FDG have pointed to this exhibition as an example of Guinness’s longstanding support and cultivation of Irish art. Citing the Rosc ’84, an international modern art exhibition held in the Guinness Hop Store, the Rosc series which took place before the creation of IMMA was seen as a pivotal series in the history of modern art in Ireland.

Representatives from FDG has said that they are “thrilled to follow in the footsteps of Rosc ’84 and those before them with their second show of 2021.”

Opening night is on September 17 at 7pm in the Guinness Storehouse, viewings will continue until September 23, for more information and to book tours of the Guinness Storehouse click here.

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You can find the Guinness Storehouse at Dublin 8’s St. James’s Gate, visit their website for more information about tickets.