GÜNCEL SERGİ / CURRENT EXHIBITION  |  21 – 26 EYLÜL / SEPTEMBER 2026  |  GALLERY 8, 8 DUKE STREET ST JAMES’S, LONDON

Hector McDonnell — Istanbul’s Light

SG Gallery x Winsor Birch

ÖNSÖZ / FOREWORD — GRANT FORD

When Hector McDonnell and Bill Montgomery asked whether I might help bring Hector’s recent Turkish pictures to London, I said yes before either of them had finished speaking.

I should explain why. For fifteen years I looked after Irish art at Sotheby’s, and those years made me. The job took me down every road in Ireland: to the great Georgian houses of the countryside, whose collections had not been seen by a specialist in a generation; to the magnificent town houses of Dublin; and, following the diaspora, to Irish collections in Canada and America. I was received with a hospitality I have met nowhere else, by people who could tell me the story of every picture on the stairs. Somewhere between the first cup of tea and the last whiskey, I fell in love with Irish painting. The sales that grew out of those journeys set world records for Irish art. But what one remembers is not the hammer prices; it is the pictures one kept meeting, and the McDonnell on the wall was the most faithful of companions. A Belfast shopfront here, a café interior there, always the same unhurried eye, always the light weighed to the ounce.

Hector is a traditionalist in one respect and a thoroughly modern painter in another, and he is the richer for both. His interiors descend in a direct line from Lavery: the same ease with a lit room, the same instinct for the figure caught between one moment and the next. His stillness is Hopper’s, and it is not fanciful to say that in Hector’s pictures Lavery and Hopper meet. His palette has the Paul Henry blues, that cool clarity only an Irish eye seems able to mix. But what is entirely his own is the way the paint itself tells the story. The cobbles in a McDonnell have been walked on, and the bar has heard the conversation. He does not describe a place so much as record what has happened in it, and that is why people live with his pictures rather than merely own them.

The pictures gathered here as Istanbul’s Light find that eye at full stretch. Turkey has given Hector a light harder, higher and more absolute than anything in the Glens. It pours down the filigree staircase of the Rüstem Pasha Mosque, flooding the Sultan’s chamber at Topkapı, and he meets it with the discipline of a lifetime. The turquoise of the Pandeli is a considered turquoise; the gulls over the fish market at Üsküdar are set down with the gravity he once gave a launderette; a snack seller’s cart is honoured exactly as a sultan’s pavilion is honoured. In the great yalı interior at Çengelköy, the Bosphorus comes indoors and takes possession of the room. The colour has a new heat, but the old refusal to embellish remains, and the result is, to my eye, the most joyous work of his career. The invitation came by way of Bill Montgomery, which makes it dearer. Bill and I spent more days on the Irish roads together than either of us would care to count, and much of what I know about Irish pictures I learnt in the passenger seat of his car.

Gallery 8 stands on Duke Street, St James’s, a hundred yards from Christie’s and in the heart of the quarter that has dealt in pictures since the age of Reynolds. I have walked these streets for the whole of my working life, past the lamps coming on in Bury Street and Ryder Street, and past the great dealerships whose back rooms have seen more fine pictures than many a museum. Hector’s work already hangs in many London houses. It is time it was seen together in St James’s.

Şule Gazioğlu curates the exhibition, and it could not be in better hands. Şule studied philosophy at Galatasaray before training at the Sotheby’s Institute in New York, and she comes from a family with three generations in the art and antiques trade. Her gallery at Emirgan, on the Bosphorus, has made Istanbul its subject since 2020. She knows the ground on which these pictures were made as no London eye could, and she has the rarer gift of letting a painting speak before she does. Hector in Turkey, seen through Istanbul and shown in London, is a happy alignment. I can think of few pleasures greater than hanging these paintings in Duke Street and opening the doors.

Grant Ford
Chairman of Winsor Birch

KÜRATORYAL METİN / CURATORIAL TEXT — ŞULE GAZİOĞLU

Istanbul is one of those cities that provides a continuous, endless fascination for anyone who experiences it, whether for a brief visit or a lifetime of living in it. Alongside the cultural and historical vastness, depth and liveliness it shares with metropolises such as Paris, New York and London, Istanbul possesses a magic entirely of its own. It is the only great metropolis built across two continents, carrying the magical light of the East while standing at the doorstep of the Western world.

Istanbul is often represented through its skyline, its mosques, the Bosphorus and its streets. Yet much of the city’s true identity is experienced elsewhere: inside apartments and yalı rooms, cafés and hotel salons, family homes, palaces, staircases, kitchens and terraces. These intimate spaces hold another Istanbul, one that is lived rather than observed, remembered rather than simply seen.

Hector McDonnell, one of the greatest living Irish painters, is a master of light and, equally, of interiors. What makes this exhibition particularly special is the way Hector approaches the city. He presents its layers of history without giving us a history lesson. He reflects upon a city in the Orient without falling into Orientalism. Instead, he finds his place within its everyday life, looking at its people, interiors and rituals on the same human ground that he would approach any place he has known and loved. What he sees is something shared: beauty, intimacy, character, memory and the simple poetry of everyday life.

His Istanbul is not a collection of landmarks. It is an exploration of intimacy: of rooms, light, objects, gestures, memories and the traces of lives lived within them. Looking at his paintings, one might think: “I have never been in this room, but I feel as though I know it.” This is where Hector’s Istanbul becomes something more than a portrait of a city—it becomes a kind of universal memory.

I feel immensely proud to be part of this exhibition and deeply honoured to have been given the opportunity to curate it. More than anything, I am excited to invite you into Hector McDonnell’s Istanbul: an Istanbul of light, memory, intimacy and endless fascination.

Şule Gazioğlu
Curator & Founder, Şule Gazioğlu Gallery