Pascal Ungerer
- 18 hours ago
- 4 min read
Pascal Ungerer is a landscape painter based in Cork, Ireland. He grew up in a remote, rural part of West Cork and has been drawn to the urban landscape ever since. He worked as a photographer for years before he started painting, and keeps an archive of over twenty years of photographs that he paints from. His landscapes are fictional, built from edges where the city thins out and the countryside has not quite started. His most recent solo show was called Other Ground.
Q: How did you get into painting landscapes? What drew you there?
A: The human and natural environment has long been an important subject of interest for artists, and I have always been drawn to the urban landscape. I think that is partly because I am originally from a very remote and rural part of Ireland. So for me, growing up, the urban landscape represented something that was different and unfamiliar.
When a lot of people imagine what landscape painting is, they have this notion of a very traditional bucolic rural environment, but I don’t think that is a realistic representation of what the contemporary landscape is. I try to show a different kind of topography in my work that is other, marginal, or dystopian.
Q: Your landscapes are fictional but start from real photographs. How do you get from the photograph to the painting?
A: Before I started painting, I worked as a photographer for several years, and photography still forms a huge part of my painting practice. I have an archive of over 20 years’ worth of photographs, and that is normally where I look for inspiration for my work. I will sometimes combine several photographs together to form a visual sketch of what I want a painting to look like, though the finished painting rarely looks anything like the photographic work that inspired it. For me, the photograph is just a starting point, and the work evolves from there, with the painting having its own visual autonomy that changes and evolves throughout its progression.
Q: You paint on the outskirts, where the city thins out and the countryside hasn't quite started. Why there?
A: Again, I think my interest in this idea of the periphery goes back to having grown up at the edge of Ireland, in one of the most south-westerly points in Europe. I have always been fascinated by this idea of marginality and places on the edge, and I try to incorporate that idea into my work.
Other influences that have inspired my thematic interest in this intersection between the urban and rural are several books I have read over the years, particularly Richard Mabey’s 1973 book “The Unofficial Countryside,” which looks at how nature can flourish in the forgotten, overlooked, or abandoned parts of the urban landscape and on the periphery. Another book that has been a big inspiration for my work is “Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness” by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, which looks at forgotten and liminal places on the margins of the city’s edge.
Q: What was Other Ground about?
A: My most recent solo show, “Other Ground,” which took place at The LAB Gallery in Dublin in 2025, takes its name from this painting, and I used that as a title because I think it represents and encapsulates a lot of what my work is about. It is about peripheral landscapes that are liminal and other. One motif or theme that is predominant in my work is architecture that is obsolescent, and this often comprises post-industrial buildings on the margins of human habitation.
I often find these structures incredibly sculptural, and I think they form an alternative or “other” urban topography that is often overlooked and temporal, as it is being eroded through the flux of urban development.
Q: You did your MFA at Goldsmiths. What did that time in London give you as a landscape painter?
A: I didn’t actually start painting in a serious way until 2019, after I finished my MFA at Goldsmiths, so when I was in London, I was still working with photography and video. I think my time at Goldsmiths really allowed me to better understand and articulate my work as an artist on a conceptual level. Some of the group crits at Goldsmiths could be pretty brutal at times, but I do think that really helped me hone down my thematic interests, which have always transcended whatever medium I work in. I think having a thematic or conceptual identity that is consistent or recognisable as an artist is really important.
Q: You have Jaipur Art Week this year. What's next?
A: Yes, I just came from India a few weeks ago after an amazing experience at Jaipur Art Week, which is a really great art festival. I love India and have traveled the country before, so it was great to revisit it and have the opportunity to bring my work there as well. Next stop is Berlin, where I will take part in a month-long residency at SomoS, where I will be funded by the Goethe-Institut. I am really looking forward to going there and making new work in such an amazing and vibrant city.
