Can Cork Build an Art Market to Match Its Cultural Ambitions?

Cork should be one of the best places in Ireland to collect art.

In 2024, wealth management firm Davy ranked Cork Ireland’s second-wealthiest county after Dublin. The Irish Independent has pointed out the county’s ‘exceptional progress’ in its economic sectors, and Central Statistics Office figures for 2021 placed Cork’s disposable household income – over €14 billion – as the second highest nationally. 

Furthermore, the Irish state is increasingly investing in the arts, with the Arts Council distributing €72 million (£62m) to organisations in 2026, and a five-year implementation plan launched in 2023 aims to remove barriers to participation in the arts. Meanwhile, the Artists’ Tax Exemption Scheme shields qualifying creative income from tax, and the Basic Income for the Arts scheme, running until 2029, is designed to ‘incentivise the development and growth of professional creative practice’. 

In Cork City, €93m (£80m) has been given to a Grafton Architects-led redevelopment of the Crawford Art Gallery, due to complete in 2028, increasing space by 50 percent. In East Cork, Sirius Arts Centre is undergoing a restoration project due to complete in 2030, funded by both the Irish Georgian Society and private philanthropy. The county is further home to The Glucksman Gallery, an art museum that is part of and primarily funded by University College Cork.

However, based on accounts of people selling art within the city, its art market has struggled in recent years. “The Cork art market has barely existed over the last five–ten years,” says Brian Mac Domhnaill, director of the Lavit Gallery, which is, by his own description, “the core of the primary art market” in the city, and the “only remaining fully-fledged sales-based gallery”. Cork Arts Society, trading as Lavit Gallery, has been selling art in the city since 1963. 

Mac Domhnaill explains that despite good sales prior to the economic crash of 2008, Cork’s most significant private commercial galleries, the Vangard Gallery and the Fenton Gallery, both closed in 2010. In 2018, Lavit became the third non-profit arts organisation and registered charity to move into a city council-owned dedicated arts space. It has since been supported by funding from Cork City Council and the national Arts Council. Mac Domhnaill describes the market as “unstable”. 

Pádraic Barrett with Body Signal, as part of Living Canvas, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.

Most of Lavit’s customers are Cork-based, with UK and US sales being significantly impacted by Brexit and president Trump’s tariffs. Based on the gallery’s 826 sales in 2025, Lavit calculates that 59.6 percent were in a price bracket under €49 (£42), 9.2 percent in the range of €500–999 (£430–860), and 7.3 percent for anything higher priced. Less than ten of its regular customers would be categorised as collectors. 

Acquisitions made by institutions often “save the day during lean times”, according to Mac Domhnaill. The Crawford Art Gallery, the Glucksman Gallery, as well as the Office of Public Works, “periodically purchase artwork for their collections”. He describes the gallery’s persistence with a “sales-based model” – a means “for artists to sell and for the public to buy, despite the figures not adding up” – as a “charitable act”.

Rather than simply declining, however, it appears that Cork’s art market has changed in the last decade. Outside of Cork City, it seems comparatively more promising. Pearse O’Sullivan, a collector and the owner of a newly established gallery, Art and Soul Kinsale, is positive, stating that he has had a “great start to the year”. Selling Irish artists in both the primary and secondary market, including Patrick Scott and Donald Teskey, artists at the stronger end of the domestic market, his buyers have been largely based locally. He adds that he believes Ireland is appreciative of art, and has encountered many eager young and middle-aged buyers. 

O’Sullivan has been collecting since he was twenty, and does so through galleries and artists he knows. He has established personal relationships with numerous Cork-based artists, and says that he often either commissions work directly or purchases entire collections, holding them before moving them to the secondary market. He states that these local artists seem generally “quite happy” from a commercial perspective.

Cork-based collectors Ken Madden and Beth-Ann Smith established an auction house, Lot 100, a year-and-a-half ago, specialising in modern and contemporary art. They deal with numerous private sales alongside, working directly between both Irish and international artists and collectors. Madden says that they refuse to discount works, which range from €2,000 to over €1m (£1720–861,000). Their collectors are a mix of the consistent and the sporadic, yet in contrast to O’Sullivan, he finds that there is a particular “gap” in young Irish collectors nationally. Despite the level of wealth in the region, Madden remarks, there is an “education gap”, especially in terms of Irish art. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled Head (Skull), from Lot 100’s ‘Modern and Contemporary Art – January Online Art Sale.’ Image courtesy of Lot100.

Cork-based artist Pádraic Barrett offers an account for younger artists in the county. Most of his own work, he says, is sustained through project-based support from the Arts Council of Ireland and Cork City Council rather than through direct sales. Through working in a sales-based gallery, he sees “an engaged ecosystem of galleries, artist-led spaces, and collectors in Cork”. He points out, however, that although “the infrastructure is certainly there… the market can be fragile and inconsistent”. 

It is possible, he says, to sustain a practice from Cork, as much of his own work is developed and produced there, but it is “largely necessary to present work beyond Cork, particularly in larger gallery and institutional contexts”. It appears that state investment and artist support is successful in sustaining young artists’ practice, yet has not necessarily translated into increasing dedicated local art-buyers. 

Cork is home to internationally established art activity, yet it has little direct impact on the local market. Frances McDonald is an independent art advisor and studio manager for Cork-based artist Joseph Walsh. She comments that Cork is small in global terms, and realistically, it cannot expect the same impact as global cultural hubs. She remarks on a tendency to look “inward”, arguing that limited global exposure has stunted the development of a broader culture of collecting and appreciation, particularly for design-based art such as Walsh's own. 

As an artist with a history of exhibitions across the Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Sotheby’s London, only a very small percentage of Walsh’s client base is in Cork, according to McDonald. While it would have represented the majority when the studio first established in the early 2000s (and there are a number of Cork-based clients who have supported Walsh since), his practice is increasingly internationally facing. He is now represented by A Lighthouse called Kanata, a Tokyo-based gallery. The studio has also hosted an annual symposium, Making In, since 2017, which has drawn in a significant number and range of international artists, curators and collectors to West Cork. 

McDonald remarks that this hopes to “energise” the market and indirectly benefit Cork’s creative economy. Yet, a feature on Design Miami’s website in 2023 described the Irish market as ‘not ready’ for his work, which McDonald remarks “is still the case”. 

Furthermore, the Frankfurt-based Crespo Foundation has run an artist residency in West Cork since 2021, bringing international artists to live and work in the region. The resulting exhibition, however, The Glenkeen Variations, opened not in Cork but in the Crespo Haus in Frankfurt in 2024. It’s apparent that international capital and artists operate in Cork, yet the majority of its cultural and commercial significance that might contribute to the local market is happening elsewhere. 

Image of Joseph Walsh exhibition. Image courtesy of A Lighthouse called Kanata.

Cork’s art market can be situated within both national and international trends. According to the Irish Arts Review’s Spring 2026 issue, it is ‘a microcosm of the international market’, with turnover falling sharply while the volume of transactions increased. Referencing Artprice’s deduction that buyers’ motives are increasingly born of pleasure rather than investment oriented, and the fact that the number of transactions under US$5,000 (£3780) continued to ‘set a new record each year for the past five years’, the Review identified a ‘democratisation of the art market’. 

This is partly due to Cork-based auction house Morgan O’Driscoll, which the Review acknowledged as pioneering ‘wholly online sales across all geographical markets’. Morgan O’Driscoll’s figures indeed reflect this broader trend: total sales fell from US$6.4m (£6.4m) in 2024 to US$5.6m (£4.2m) in 2025 and US$3.1m (£2.3m) so far in 2026, but saw sell-through rates in their three most recent sales of between 83 percent and 94 percent.

This pattern of falling value and rising volume reads differently depending on which area of the market it’s applied to. At Lavit Gallery – where almost 60 percent of sales fall under €50 and only 7.3 percent of sales reach over €999 – it indicates less of a ‘democratisation’ than a market reduced to the lowest tier. With Art and Soul Kinsale’s “great start to the year” and Lot 100’s range of works from €2,000 to over €1m, there is an indication of a democratised market for local art collecting, with accessible entry points alongside higher-value transactions. It appears that Cork may not have one market experiencing this national trend uniformly, but two, operating at opposing ends of it, depending where exactly in the county one is looking. 

The market hasn’t simply declined, but has relocated and become more opaque. The county has wealth and state backing, as well as pockets of international significance, yet a visible, gallery-led commercial market in Cork City hasn’t seemed to capture it in recent years. Rather, emerging galleries and auction houses, private dealing, and personal artist-collector relationships indicate a more active market outside of the city. 

Despite government investment and an active ecosystem, there is a broadly acknowledged gap in awareness, arts-based education and a culture of art collecting locally. Barrett’s account, that it is still necessary to find larger international institutions and galleries to support a practice in Cork, aligns with McDonald’s recognition that the county needs more places to see art and for art to be seen. Mac Domhnaill confirms that, despite the “huge potential for professionals with disposable income… the future of the Cork art market is entirely dependent on a shift towards an appreciation of art”.

This local gap matters more than it may have done a decade ago. The Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2026 found that while the art market’s growth has historically been supported by ‘global and cross-border trade,’ dealers and auction house reports indicate an increased focus on domestic sales, as trade policies, tariffs and rising logistical and administrative costs make international transactions harder. That international retreat is already apparent in Cork, with both the Lavit and Art and Soul Kinsale galleries reporting fewer international buyers due to US tariffs and Brexit. It suggests that Cork’s art market will have to be increasingly sustained by domestic buyers, and the cultivation of a local culture of art collecting, appreciation and exposure will become an increasingly pressing factor for its future.