Aleana Egan
b. 1979, Dublin, Ireland

Working primarily with sculpture and occasionally painting, Aleana Egan engenders psychological states and memories through enigmatic arrangements of objects and forms. Her sculptural works appear restrained yet laden with subtle references to the built environment using materials such as plaster, cardboard, matte paint and various fabrics. A meandering, sensuous line and sense of fluidity is carried from her sculptures into her painting, giving form to a sense of flux, openness and mutability. Egan’s practice is shaped by her deep engagement with works of literature and cinema: never opting for direct representation, she uses this source material as an entryway, absorbing the moods and tones it evokes. Her forms and shapes act as traces or shifting responses, tentative articulations of remembered places or everyday moments. 

Aleana Egan has exhibited at Sculpture Center, New York; Kunsthalle Basel; Kunsthalle zu Kiel; Landesmuseum Münster; The Drawing Room and Jerwood Space, London; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh; Leeds Art Gallery; the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Temple Bar Gallery and IMMA, Dublin, and the Berlin Biennale. Forthcoming exhibitions include a solo exhibition at St Carthage Hall, Lismore Castle Arts and a two-person exhibition with Isabel Nolan at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda (both 2024). Recent solo exhibitions include Kerlin Gallery (2023); Void, Derry (2022); Künstlerhaus Bremen (2021); NICC Vitrine Brussels (2020) and Farbvision, Berlin (2019). Recent group exhibitions include Stations, Berlin (2023); CCA Andratx, Mallorca (2022); The Complex, Dublin and The Classical Museum, University College Dublin (both 2021).

Jaki Irvine
b. 1966, Dublin

Jaki Irvine works with video installation, photography, music composition and writing. Her immersive video and sound installations tell stories through fragmented, elliptical and open-ended narratives informed by rigorous research. Irvine picks out evocative details from the landscape or cityscape, in particular honing in on Dublin and Mexico City, two cities that have shaped and informed her practice. Contested histories, sonic bricolage, the built environment, and the customs and communities of a city’s residents have all found their way into Irving’s deep-reaching and polyphonic work: songs that filter through a city’s streets, overheard conversations, the flap of a hummingbird’s wings are given equal gravitas. Her attention is often turned to the peripheral or the undervalued: recentring stories or figures written out of history, particularly female figures, or presenting an alternative approach to the present, making space for strangeness. Humans and nature become intertwined in her imaginative worldview, with plants, birds and creatures permeating her practice, and adding to the sense of the unknown and unknowable, and blurring the boundary between the real and the imagined.  

Recent exhibitions include two-person exhibitions with Locky Morris, Void Gallery, Derry (2023) and The Complex, Dublin (2022); The Bower Gallery (2021); Ack Ro’, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, (2020); If the Ground Should Open..., Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, (2016–2017); City of Women, The LAB, Dublin, (2010); Seven Folds in Time, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2009); In a World Like This, The Model, Sligo, (2006), travelling to Chisenhale Gallery, London (2007); The Silver Bridge, SMART, Amsterdam (2006); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2005); Nightingale, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, (2005 &1999); Plans for forgotten works, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, (2005); Ivana’s Answers, Delfina Project Space, London, (2001); “Fledermaus she said....”,Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden, Germany, (1998) and Eyelashes, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, (1996). In 1997, Irvine represented Ireland in the Venice Biennale.

Elizabeth Magill
 b. 1959, Canada. Lives and works in London

Described by critic Isobel Haribson as “epic, enigmatic and evocative”, Elizabeth Magill’s highly idiosyncratic paintings present subjective and psychological takes on the landscape genre. Rich with kaleidoscopic patterning and fragmented forms, these vistas are embedded in place – usually rural settings on the edges of settlements – but transported through the artist’s imagination, memories, photographs or moods to be presented as something other: lush, visionary recollections of hills, lakes, hedges and skies glowing with ambient light. The term ‘inscape’ has been used to describe Magill’s practice: landscapes not based on direct observation, but imbued with a sense of interiority and reflection. Though they have a cinematic beauty, her paintings can also be eerie or unsettling: trees or telephone wires conceal the view; birds are silhouetted in the dark; rare human figures feel distant, phantasmal; colours feel subdued, or occasionally toxic. Magill’s complex and densely layered paintings are produced using various techniques, at times incorporating stencilling, screenprinting and collage, as well as the pouring, blending, dripping, splashing and scraping away of paint. Film and photography are also central to her research, shaping the way the artist looks at landscape, and infusing her approach to light, tone and atmosphere.

Elizabeth Magill has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Arnolfini, Bristol; Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool; PEER, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Milton Keynes Gallery; BALTIC, Gateshead; Towner Gallery, Eastbourne; Southampton City Art Gallery and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. Recent solo exhibitions include Annely Juda Fie Art, London (2023); Miles McEnery Gallery, New York (2022); Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2021, 2020); Pent House, Margate (2020); New Art Gallery, Walsall; 12 Star Gallery, London (both 2019); Ulster Museum, Belfast; Matt’s Gallery, London; the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (all 2018) and Limerick City Gallery of Art (2017). 

William McKeown
b. 1962, Tyrone, Ireland. d. 2011. Edinburgh, Scotland.

William McKeown made paintings, drawings, prints and installations that captured the openness and transcendent power of nature. Guided by a belief in the primacy of feeling, his paintings took on the guise of objective minimalism and the monochrome, but presented us with so much more: nature as something real, tangible, all around us, to be touched and felt. Each painting is slightly off-square, undermining the perfection of geometry, and scaled roughly to the size of the human chest, as if mirroring the capacity of our lungs to breathe in air. Sometimes presented in ‘room installations’, wooden structures with wallpaper, windows and artificial light that mimic a clinical setting, his works act as windows out onto the world – an escape from the repression and mundanity of everyday life and into the lightness and expansiveness of the sky, using subtle gradations of tone to create moments of exquisite beauty and bliss. Frequently using titles such as ‘Hope’ and ‘Freedom’, McKeown steered our attention to the air around us, capturing the feeling of our emergence into light and reminding us of our proximity to the infinite.

William McKeown’s work has been exhibited at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, NY; The Drawing Centre, New York; BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh and National Gallery of Ireland. In 2022, McKeown was the subject of the inaugural exhibition at the Richard Rogers Gallery, Château La Coste, curated by Jonathan Anderson. He has also had solo exhibitions at Dallas Museum of Art; LOEWE Design District Store, Miami; Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh; mima, Middlesbrough; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore and Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast. In 2005, he represented Northern Ireland in the 51st Venice Biennale.

Sean Scully
b. 1945, Dublin, Ireland

A world-renowned abstract painter, Sean Scully is one of the leading artists of his generation. He is best known for his impactful and internationally recognisable paintings balancing dynamic bands of colour in rhythmic formulations, capturing tonality, light and mood with great drama and delicacy. His global but deeply personal perspective has seen him absorb the core elements of the visual world – sky, sea, stone – as well as the full spectrum of human pathos, from grief and pain to fatherhood. Scully’s art is highly physical, often monumental in scale and populated by vigorous, robust shape and form, and yet it is also an art of great honesty, intimacy, and even vulnerability. An abstractionist but not a formalist, Scully deploys the power of colour, depth and volume not only to give expression to the world around him, but to provide access to the spiritual domain. In recent years, the artist’s explorations of space and volume have continued into large-scale sculptural works – monumental and megalithic-feeling stone blocks that weigh down on the land, as well as airy structures in Corten steel that open up and interact with the landscape. Across these diverse approaches to making art, Scully utilises a consciously constrained system to open up an energetic multiplicity of aesthetic possibility and emotional range.

Sean Scully has had solo exhibitions in leading museums around the world including, most recently, Houghton Hall, UK (2023); the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Thorsvaldens Museum, Copenhagen; MAMbo, Bologna; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; CSW, Torun, Poland (all 2022); Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth; Benaki Museum, Athens; Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest (all 2021); Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut; the Albertina Museum, Vienna; LWL Museum, Münster; the National Gallery, London; and the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice (all 2019). Recent exhibitions include Géographies, Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Brest, France and Artists Choose Parrish, Parrish Art Museum, Long Island, NY, USA.

Zhou Li
b. 1969, Hunan, China. Lives and works in Shenzhen

Zhou Li creates paintings, sculptures, installations and public art using mixed media, including oil paint, washes of ink, charcoal and cotton cloth. Her lyrical abstract painting capture her acute sensory observations of the world: lightness and shadow, solidity and dissolution, the sense of being. Building upon the history of European painting and the central tenets of traditional Chinese art (Qiyun, or atmosphere; brush stroke; colour and structural arrangement), Zhou Li harnesses both traditions to develop a distinct painterly language. Her free-flowing charcoal lines intersect with circles of paint in a gauzy, gossamer palette; these delicate, layered forms appear to float in space and follow a complex compositional arrangement that extends beyond the surface of the painting. Her paintings looks towards nature as a starting point, particularly the mountainous terrains of Southern China, but are imbued with a sense of much more: every brush stroke on the canvas is driven by her persistent query and pursuit of being.

Zhou Li’s recent solo exhibitions include Water and Dreams, Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence; Kerlin Gallery; Tracing Peach Blossom Spring, Pingshan Art Museum, Shenzhen, China (all 2022); Lost in Green: Zhou Li, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China (2020); Original State of Mind, White Cube, London (2019); The Ring of Life, Hive Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing and Shadow of the Wind, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (both 2017). Recent group exhibitions include Greater Than Abstraction,
Bund Art Center, Shanghai; the 9th BiCity Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, Shenzhen (both 2022); The Clouded Peach Blossom Spring, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2019); The world is yours, as well as ours, White Cube Mason’s Yard, London (2016); Too Loud a Solitude, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (both 2016); and From West to East, 56th Venice Biennale, Italy (2015).