Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh

28 August - 25 September

An exhibition of paintings exploring line-based imagery and abstract elements by this Wicklow-based artist.

Sinead Ní Mhaonaigh's work to date has explored space and non-spaces in the form of abstract images. She describes these spaces and non-spaces as portraying a void. Her paintings allude to the idea of a contemplative place, between where a journey begins or ends. She views the artistic process, and a picture in the making, as a space of possibility and of transformative potential. Ní Mhaonaigh places the viewer at the edges and borders of undefined space - an interval or gap - merging the performative with the philosophical. These intelligent explorations of the fundamentals of abstraction expand and transcend the basics.

Ní Mhaonaigh uses rich, creamy coats of oil paint to create sumptuous surfaces. Austere yet richly coloured, scraped and layered - the paintings have a deceptive simplicity. She is judicious in her palette, using colour sparingly, finding an edgy balance between austerity and lushness.

As art historian and curator Pádraic E.Moore has written, Sinéad’s “paintings lies in their extrovertly taciturn quality, and by the way in which the gutsy, even aggressive application of colour is countered by the sensitive and delicately tentative scoring of the paint in all its precise and potent hues. Rare is it to see paint being worked so sensually and yet often so brutally. The juicy colours push and pull, and the eye is caught in an impossible impasse. Are we gazing onto boundless unlimited and infinite space, or are we peering into claustrophobically constraining, sealed and hermetic compartments from which nothing can leak? Can we, simultaneously, do both?”

This new body of work explores the line-based imagery that's inherent in her work alongside non-linear, abstract elements to embody ideas about the division between different aspects of her process and between two opposing states: consciousness and the subconscious.

Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh was born in 1977. She completed her BA Fine Art at Dublin Institute of Technology in 2001 and is currently working towards her MPhil at DIT.

Recent exhibitions include Paintings, Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise and New Work, Sligo Art Gallery in 2010; Paintings , Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin; Futures, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, (curated by Patrick T. Murphy & Ruth Carroll) and solo exhibitions at Wexford Arts Centre and Galway Arts Centre in 2009; Orange, Weiss, Gelb, Ard Bia Berlin; Paintings, Ard Bia Galway and Aras Eanna, Inis Oirr and Platform, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in 2008. Her work can be seen in the collections of The Arts Council of Ireland, Office of Public Works, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ahern & Co, Coláiste ĺosagáin, The National Centre for Youth Mental Health, Boyle Civic Collection, The Mermaid Arts Centre and private collections in Ireland, UK and USA.