COMHGHALL CASEY

From Friday 9th October to Sunday 11 October 2009, Solomon Fine Art will be hosting an exhibition of new paintings by Comhghall Casey.

Comhghall Casey was born in 1976 in Letterkenny, Co. Donegal and grew up in Omagh in Co. Tyrone.  He moved to Belfast in 1994 to study Art and Design at the University of Ulster and graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art in 1998.   After spending two years in Belfast, he moved to Dublin and has been living and working here ever since.

Comhghall generally works on a small scale and his preferred subject matter is still life, self-portraiture and occasionally landscape painting.  In the still life works he chooses to study mundane, deliberately ordinary, everyday objects, such as houseplants, guitars, rocks, cuts of meat, fruits or children’s toys.  Each object is placed centrally against a neutral background, along the dividing line between the simple tabletop and background wall.  Devoid of any narrative or meaning, Comhghall explains that in some way he is “trying to give an importance to these objects, to convey their tangibility, to freeze their presence”.

Comhghall also produces a self-portrait approximately once every other month and the forthcoming exhibition will feature one of his most recent examples.  Like the still lives, the portrait poses are simply composed, allowing him to work on colour and composition.  Yet they also raise questions of self-awareness, self-image and self-consciousness.

For such a relatively young artist, Comhghall has already achieved many awards and accolades both in Ireland and Britain.  In the UK, he won both the 1999 Young Artist of the Year and the Regional Prize (Belfast) in the nationwide Hunting Art Prize; and in 2002, one of his self-portraits was short-listed for the BP National Portrait Award and was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London.  Closer to home, he has won the Best Self-Portrait Award (Emer Gallery Prize) at the Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition on three occasions in 1999, 2002 and 2006.  Comhghall was nominated four times for the prestigious Hennessy Craig Scholarship at the Royal Hibernian Academy and was eventually awarded the €10,000 prize at last year’s RHA 2008 Annual Exhibition in Dublin.   

High resolution digital images available on request
Contact Tara Murphy on 086 8142380 or tara@solomonfineart.ie for further details