Liliane Tomasko’s abstract paintings employ a distinctive, bold lyricism, with an equally unabashed sense of colour. The artist often begins with a study of the personal effects of everyday domesticity such as bedding or clothing to create work that suggests a gateway into the realms of sleep and dreaming; delving into the gulf between what we understand as the ‘conscious’ and ‘subconscious.’  Recent paintings display an increasing vitality and assertiveness, articulating an abstraction that is rooted in the physical realm but attempting a departure from it. Intense colour, subtle tone, shadows and painterly gesture are woven together in such a way that space comes in and out of focus, suspending one’s perception of them and emulating the clarity or lack thereof of dreams and memories.

Selected solo exhibitions include Edward Hopper House, Nyack, New York, USA (2022); Kunstmuseum Kloster unser lieben Frauen Magdeburg, Germany (2021); Château la Coste, France (2019);  Museo MATE, Lima, Peru; ROCA Rockland Center for the Arts, New York, USA (both 2018); Kunstwerk, two-person exhibition with Sean Scully, Sammlung Klein, Germany (2017); Lowe Art Museum, Miami, USA; Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, USA and Kunstalle Rostock, Germany (all 2015). Tomasko’s work is represented in the public collections of The Albertina, Vienna; Hilti Art Foundation, Liechtenstein; Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Lowe Art Museum, Miami; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

In his new series, ‘Arizona’ Brian Maguire continues his critique of contemporary capitalism, painting images based on events at the southern border of the USA. Some five years ago Maguire began to research the annual fatalities of Central American migrants in the deserts around Tucson, Arizona. The numbers of those who have died are frightening, the recent annual average is 145 deaths. In September 2019 Maguire made contact with the Chief Medical Officer of Pima County who allowed access to the images of the dead which were originally created by law enforcement. From 500 cases Maguire selected 90 as an archive from which to create these paintings. The dead remain anonymous to protect the families’ privacy.

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.

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 Centre, 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. She has also participated in the Berlin Biennale. In recent years, she has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Void Derry, Northern Ireland (2022); Künstlerhaus Bremen (2021); NICC Vitrine Brussels (2020) and Farbvision, Berlin (2019). Recent group exhibitions include The Classical Museum, University College Dublin (2021); Cample Line, Scotland; Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin; Scoil Lorcáin, Seapoint (all 2019); Drawing Room, London (2019, 2017) and Project Space Tilburg (2017).

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 Kerlin Gallery (2021); 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). Her work can be found in the collections of the Tate, London; the British Museum; the National Gallery of Australia; the Irish Museum of Modern Art; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; the Ulster Museum; the Crawford, Cork; the Government Art Collection, London; the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Marcel Vidal makes paintings and sculptures. Quietly disarming and unsettling us with an ominous beauty, Vidal’s paintings are marked by their controlled brushwork, layering oil on linen with delicacy and precision. They are refined and restrained, incarnating brightly lit fragments of photographs or digital images: unidentified figures seem caught by flashbulbs, and hold their arms in defensive barriers; glossy foliage catches the light before retreating into darkness; distinguished hands are frozen mid-clap. Vidal’s minimal compositions are severely cropped to reveal only a sliver of their subject, using ambiguity to frustrate interpretation, all while inviting our curiosity. 

Selected solo exhibitions include Stuck on dawn, Kerlin Gallery (2021); Everybody Knows | Paul Hallahan and Marcel Vidal, The Complex, Dublin (2020); SILVERFISH, The Dock Arts, Carrick on Shannon (2018); Donut, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin (2017/2018); #untitled, Basic Space, Dublin (2013). Selected group exhibitions include, Hennessy Craig Award, Royal Hibernian Academy, Ireland (2019); Zurich Portrait Prize, National Gallery of Ireland (2019); Too Much Sugar, Drawing & Installation Station, TBG+S, Ireland (2019); Syntonic State, Tulca, Galway (2018); Hannah Fitz / Áine McBride / Daniel Rios Rodriguez / Marcel Vidal, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2017) and MOON FARK, Jason Dunne / Marcel Vidal / David Eager Maher, RAKE, Norway (2014). Vidal was a recipient of Fire Station Artist Residential Studio (2020), the Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award and the winner of The Hennessy Craig Award, RHA Gallery, Dublin (both 2019).

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 – from the sky and sea to the ascetic modesty of stone architectural structures – 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.

Recent solo exhibitions include The Shape of Ideas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA (2022); Song of Color, Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany (2022); Passenger, Benaki Museum (2021); The Shape of Ideas, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2021); Eleuthera, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2021); Passenger, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, Hungary (2021) travelling to the Benaki Museum, Athens (2021-22); Insideoutside, Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden, Wuppertal, Germany (2020-21), Opulent Ascension, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster, Germany, (2020); Aeternum, Forum Paracelsus, St Moritz, (2020); Eleuthera, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga, Spain,(2019/2020); Long Night, Villa e Collezione Panza, Varese, Italy,(2019 / 2020); Sean Scully. Celtique at Picasso House, Château de Boisgeloup, Gisros, France, (2019); Landline, The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, (2019); Eleuthera, Albertina, Vienna, (2019); Sea Star, National Gallery, London, (2019); Vita Duplex, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, (2018); Landlines and other recent works, De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg (2018); Sean Scully: 1970, Walker Art, Liverpool Museum, (2018); Inside Outside, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, (2018) & THE LAND / THE LINE, Kerlin Gallery (2018).