Felim Egan's paintings have for some time been concerned with balancing geometrical characters against monochromatic expanses of colour in a lyrical and almost musical interaction between inventiveness on the one hand and deliberate restriction and control on the other. His characters have a playful, animated quality and yet there has always been an austere elegance about his work. In recent years the paintings have been increasingly perceived as being directly related to landscape and seascape with the artist's sophisticated sense of colour and texture suggesting the delicate nuances of the horizon line in different stages of daylight.

Intervals in blue and preludes for abg, a body of 6 large 'interval' paintings and 12 smaller painted three dimensional boxes, 'preludes' represents Egan's most recent and most ambitious works to date. Undoubtedly connected to and inspired by music these paintings employ a vocabulary that appears much freer than previous work, creating an increased sense of fluency and movement.

Felim Egan is one Ireland's most internationally successful contemporary artists. He represented Ireland in the 1980 Biennale de Paris and the Bienal de Sao Paolo in 1985. In 1984 he had exhibitions at the Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, and the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. In 1993 he was awarded the Premier UNESCO Prize for the Arts in Paris, and he received the Gold Award at Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1997. He has collaborated with A.R. Penck and the poet Seamus Heaney. Major exhibitions of his work were held in 1995/6 at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and the Irish Museum of Modern Art and he was the first Irish artist to be shown in a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam which took place in 1999. Large-scale commissions include works for Dublin Castle and the National Gallery of Ireland. Egan is represented in numerous collections, both public and private, including those of the Irish Museum of Modern Art; Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin; AIB, Ireland; Deutsche Bank, London and the European Parliament.