Meaning ‘The Love of Heroes’, Luigi Ontani’s first exhibition at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill is a study of the idea of true heroism and its connection with love, as interpreted in both sophisticated literary culture and popular traditions. Whether it be a ceramic sculpture of Garibaldi or an image of Ontani as Shivaji, the warrior-king revered as a god in Western India, Eros appears and disappears, always ambiguous, often disguised, as a source - if not the source - of the true heroic act.

Max Renkel concentrates on the study of colour and composition. His paintings, at first abstract, gradually reveal an imagery based on observation of nature and the human figure.

Manfredi Beninati’s use of images of the family in his paintings flirts with the conventional Madonna and child, provoking a modern, psychological interpretation of the genesis of life.

Jeff Wall's first show in Rome comprises a group of carefully composed cibachrome transparencies in lightboxes, each of which is defined and yet internally energized by human absence. The images appear to endow the mundane with a status as works of art, adopting a compositional rigour to contradict the seeming simplicity of the subjects. 

Gary Hume's 2008 exhibition at Galleria Lorcan O'Neill consists of a number of large works of baby birds, each composed in his characteristic medium of colourful houshold gloss on aluminium panels, alongside smaller works of the birds' nests. Hume mediates between the figurative and abstract, with the delicate nature of small birds encouraging meditation on the convergence of vulnerability and determination.