Willie Doherty
b. 1959, Derry, Northern Ireland
Lives and works in Donegal and Derry

Willie Doherty has been a pioneering figure in contemporary art film and photography for four decades. Exploring the relationship between landscape and memory, Doherty responds to mysterious isolated settings that conceal a troubled past. Whether in the US or his native Northern Ireland, the artist studies these terrains in forensic detail, as if leaking the stories contained within the landscape. Doherty’s video and photo works reveal the impossibility of objectivity and historical truth, using powerful language and disorientating imagery to reflect on how we approach histories of trauma.

Doherty has exhibited in many of the world’s leading museums and international exhibitions including Documenta, Manifesta, the Carnegie International, FRONT International Cleveland Triennial and the Venice, São Paulo and Istanbul biennales. The photographs shown at Art Basel Miami Beach are from a recent institutional touring solo exhibition, Remnant, visiting Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, Ireland and Matts Gallery, London, UK (both 2024).

Aleana Egan
b. 1979, Dublin, Ireland
Lives and works in Dublin, Ireland

Working with sculpture, painting and film, Aleana Egan engenders psychological states through enigmatic arrangements of objects and forms. A meandering, sensuous line is carried from her sculptures into her paintings, populated by fragmentary shapes that hint at solid forms or gesture towards movement. Creating atmospheric shifts that feel open-ended, or in a state of flux, Egan articulates a distinct worldview infused by literary, cinematic, and architectural references as well as memories imprinted deep in the psychic landscape.

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; the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Temple Bar Gallery and IMMA, Dublin, and the Berlin Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include Material Flux, a two-person exhibition with Isabel Nolan at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda (2024); Lismore Castle Arts, Co Waterford (2024); Kerlin Gallery (2023); Void, Derry (2022); Künstlerhaus Bremen (2021).

Mark Francis
b. 1962, Newtownards, Northern Ireland
Lives and works in London, UK

Mark Francis makes powerful, optically intense paintings that are driven by the revelatory insights of contemporary science. Filled with a sense of movement and vibrational energy, his paintings combine electric colour contrasts with dynamic patterns and precise brushwork. Making striking imagery out of what is normally invisible, he explores the visual worlds made accessible by electron microscopes, or sonic data gathered from outer space. But while the feats of manmade technology inform Francis’s work, the thing of wonder remains the unknowable quantities beyond their reach. This is what Francis uses his imaginative power and painterly skills to conjure – sparking a tension between order and chaos, knowledge and mystery that is at the heart of his work.

Mark Francis’s work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, Brooklyn Museum; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Tate, London and Liverpool; Whitechapel Gallery, Design Museum, and the Royal Academy in London; The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin. Recent exhibitions include Acoustic Oceans, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (Solo, 12 July – 24 August) and Collecting Contemporary, British Museum, London, UK (Group, 25 April – 29 September); three-person exhibition at Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany (2024); and a solo exhibition at Palazzo Collicola Spoleto, Italy (Solo, 2022).

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

William McKeown’s art was driven by a lifelong pursuit of openness and a belief in the primacy of feeling. His paintings act like windows into the expansiveness beyond, offering liberation from constraint, or quite simply a breath of air, and a point of connection with the world. In the thirteen years since his untimely passing, the artist’s work has continued to resonate with new audiences worldwide, and the underlying quest of his work – for hope, freedom, connection, happiness, dancing, and oneness with nature – remains as vital as ever.

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. Solo exhibitions include Dallas Museum of Art; Château La Coste, France, curated by Jonathan Anderson; 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, Ireland. In 2005, he represented Northern Ireland in the 51st Venice Biennale.

Isabel Nolan
b. 1974, Dublin, Ireland
Lives and works in Dublin, Ireland

A tribute to the fundamental ways humans bring the world into meaning, Isabel Nolan’s work responds to big, often abstract, ideas with intimacy and materiality. The artist’s practice is materially expansive, matching the scope and scale of her varied interests; encompassing architectural, steel sculptures, handmade objects, tapestries, water-based oil paintings, pencil drawings or texts. Dashing hopes is a tubular steel and rope sculpture first made for Material Flux, a recent institutional two-person exhibition with Aleana Egan at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda and responds to the architecture of the gallery, a former Franciscan church.

Isabel Nolan will represent Ireland at the 2026 Venice Biennale and will exhibit in the 2025 Liverpool Biennial. Solo exhibitions include Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence; Void Gallery, Derry; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Mercer Union, Toronto; London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE, London; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Solstice Arts Centre, Navan; Kunstverein Graz, Austria; Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany and Musée d’art moderne de Saint Etienne, France. 

Paul Winstanley
b. 1954, Manchester, UK
Lives and works in London, UK

Paul Winstanley is a painter who uses the genres of landscape, interior, still life and figure painting to create works of conceptual rigour. The relationship of the viewer to the painting is often seen as central to the content of the work. In this body of work, Winstanley looks towards early 19th-century painting of mountainous landscapes, and their exploration of the aesthetics of the sublime. Revisiting and reinventing this genre, the artist articulates the ways in which pictures mythologise reality.

Paul Winstanley has exhibited at many of the world's leading museums, including Renaissance Gallery, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis; New Orleans Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Tate, Hayward Gallery, Barbican Centre, Whitechapel Gallery, Royal Academy, all London; Fondation del’Hermitage, Lausanne; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Kunstverein Freiburg; Museum of Modern Art, Rome; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Artspace, Auckland and Museu de Arte de São Paolo. Current/forthcoming exhibitions include Arcadia, Kerlin Gallery (Solo, 29 November 2024 – 18 January 2025).