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arts · Friday 2 October 2026 · 10:00am 
Imposter: Louise Butler Exhibition
At Dunamaise Arts Centre · Church Street, Portlaoise, Co. Laois
At Dunamaise Arts Centre · Church Street, Portlaoise, Co. Laois
Artist Louise Butler’s exhibition Imposter opens at Dunamaise Arts Centre on Friday, 2 October 2026 and runs through the month to Friday, 30 October. The show is built around a fictional madame who obsessively commissions portraits of herself in pursuit of a legacy she feels she deserves, a premise Butler uses to explore vanity, self-image and the gap between how people present themselves and how they actually see themselves. Admission is free throughout the exhibition’s run in the centre’s gallery on Church Street.
Imposter is a collection of artworks built around that single invented character, the self-commissioning madame, rather than a series of unrelated pieces loosely grouped under a theme. Visitors can expect a body of work that reads more like a character study in paint than a conventional portrait show, with the fictional subject’s obsession with legacy and self-presentation running through the pieces on display. The gallery is open during normal Dunamaise opening hours across the four-week run, so there is no need to plan around a single opening event, though the centre typically holds a launch evening early in an exhibition’s run that visitors can ask about at the box office. As with all exhibitions at Dunamaise, the show sits inside a working arts centre that also has theatre, music and film on at the same time, so a visit can easily be combined with an evening show.
Dunamaise Arts Centre is on Church Street in Portlaoise town centre, a short walk from the train station and the main car parks. Portlaoise is on the Dublin to Cork and Dublin to Limerick rail lines and just off the M7 motorway, making the centre one of the easier venues in the county to reach without a car.
Dunamaise anchors the arts scene in the county town, and a gallery visit pairs easily with lunch or a browse of the shops nearby. There is more to see in Portlaoise and across Co. Laois.
Heading to Dunamaise Arts Centre in Portlaoise? Laois has plenty more to see. Read the Portlaoise area guide, find what else is on, and explore the towns and villages nearby.