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.

Callum Innes creates abstract paintings that carry a powerful tension between control and fluidity. Dissolution is central to his practice: layers of deep pigments are brushed over with turpentine, breaking down sections of paint and leaving watery, trace elements, before being painted over again. Repeating this process of painting, dissolving and repainting multiple times, Innes builds depth and a sense of history: oblique panels of dense pigments become embedded and fortified, while tiny trickles or rivulets of liquified paint point to their underlying fragility. This meticulous approach to materials is carried across into the artists’ watercolours and pastels, in which pigment is built up into velveteen layers. Though Innes’ works may seem minimal or geometric at first glance, they are in fact always slightly “off kilter”, governed by imperfectly drawn lines and slightly softened shapes. This fallibility and humanity, put in contrast with the artist’s skill and precision as a painter, results in works of great poetic and contemplative power – cementing Innes’ place as one of the most significant abstract painters of his generation.

Callum Innes has been the subject of solo exhibitions at De Pont Museum, Tilburg; Kunsthalle Bern; Neues Museum, Nürnberg; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the ICA, London; the Scottish National Gallery, and the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Modern Art Oxford; the Whitworth, Manchester; IMMA, Dublin, and recently at Château La Coste, Provence (2018). His work can be found in the collections of Albright-Knox, Buffalo; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museé des Beaux Arts, Lausanne; National Galleries of Australia, Canberra; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York and TATE Gallery, London.

Since the very beginning of his career in the 1970s, Brian Maguire has approached painting as an act of solidarity. He operates a truly engaged practice, compelled by the raw realities of humanity’s violence against itself, and the potential for justice. Maguire’s preoccupations draw him to the margins of the art world—alternative space, prisons, women’s shelters, and psychiatric institutions—making shows in traditional gallery and museum spaces something of a rarity. He works slowly, using photographic sources, searching for that point where illustration ceases and art begins.

Solo exhibitions include Brian Maguire: In The Light of Conscience, Missoula Art Museum, Montana (18 March – 13 August 2022); Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (2021 –2022); Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, USA (2021); American University Museum, Washington DC and United Nations Headquarters, New York, USA (both 2020); Rubin Center, Texas University, USA (2019); Art Museum Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (2019); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2018); Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2018) and the European Parliament, Brussels (2012). Maguire’s work is represented in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art; The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Museum of Fine Art Houston, Texas; Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag, The Netherlands; Alvar Alto Museum, Finland and The Tia Collection, Santa Fe.

Isabel Nolan has an expansive practice that incorporates sculptures, paintings, textile works, photographs, writing and works on paper. Her subject matter is similarly comprehensive, taking in cosmological phenomena, religious reliquaries, Greco-Roman sculptures and literary/historical figures, examining the behaviour of humans and animals alike. These diverse artistic investigations are driven by intensive research, but the end result is always deeply personal and subjective. Exploring the “intimacy of materiality”, Nolan’s work ranges from the architectural – steel sculptures that frame or obstruct our path – to small handmade objects in clay, hand-tufted wool rugs illuminated with striking cosmic imagery, to drawings and paintings using humble gouache or colouring pencils. In concert, they feel equally enchanted by and afraid of the world around us, expressing humanity’s fear of mortality and deep need for connection as well as its startling achievements in art and thought. Driven by “the calamity, the weirdness, horror, brevity and wonder of existing alongside billions of other preoccupied humans”, her works give generous form to fundamental questions about the ways the chaos of the world is made beautiful or given meaning through human activity.

Isabel Nolan has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Mercer Union, Toronto; London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE, London; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; IMMA, Dublin; Kunstverein Graz, Austria; Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany and Musée d’art moderne de Saint Etienne, France. Her work has also been exhibited at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Salzburger Kunstverein; Centre of Contemporary Art, Geneva; Artspace, Sydney; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh; Daejeon Museum of Art, South Korea and Beijing Art Museum of the Imperial City, Beijing. Nolan has participated in international group exhibitions and biennales including the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; Lofoten International Arts Festival (LIAF); Mediations Biennale, Poznan; Yugoslav Biennale of Young Artists, Vršac, Serbia; Glasgow International and EVA International Limerick.