O’Malley once said 'I've always regarded painting as a sacramental thing. It's a great mystery, you know. You work on it day after day and then suddenly something happens, a revelation'.

From 1961 O'Malley began a unique series of paintings. On or around every Good Friday, he would make a work which, if obliquely, addressed the theme of Christ's passion. The series ranges from Wooden Collage, Good Friday (1968), a strikingly simple evocation of the Crucifixion in blackened fragments of wood and slate, to Good Friday Painting (1994), which bears the expanded repertoire of gesture and colour resulting from his visits to the Bahamas in the 1970s and 80s.

In his accompanying text, the exhibition's curator Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith considers how these works continue to embody a primal image of suffering and redemption, whilst marking the celebratory rituals of faith in Western culture.

A colour illustrated catalogue produced by the Irish Museum of Modern Art with essays by the curator, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith and Catherine Marshall, Senior Curator, Head of Collections at IMMA, is available from Tate St Ives gallery shop.