Seán McSweeney

Seán McSweeney was born in Dublin in 1935. Self-taught as a painter, he lived in Wicklow for many years before moving to the west coast of Sligo in the 1980s,  surrounding himself with the landscape that became the leitmotif of his work.  He died in the summer of 2018. 

 

Consistently drawn to the characteristic "horizontality" of the bogland, sea fields and flat expanses of shoreline that surrounded his home near the coast, he  returned repeatedly to the same subjects, painting them in various lights and  through the changing seasons. The resulting paintings, drawings and prints  verge on abstraction: bog pools are reduced to rectangular shapes bordered by  grasses and plants, while coastlines are represented by bands of colour that  demarcate the boundaries between land, sea and sky. 

 

Seán McSweeney began exhibiting at the Cavendish Gallery on Parnell Square,  opposite the Gate Theatre, in the late 1950s and featured in the first Irish  Exhibition of Living Art in 1962. He had his first solo show with Leo Smith's  Dawson Gallery in 1965 and has been represented by Taylor Galleries since  1978.

 

The recipient of numerous awards and prizes, he exhibited extensively in  Ireland and abroad and was an Honorary member of the Royal Hibernian  Academy and a member of Aosdána. His work is represented in private  collections in Ireland, the UK, Europe and North America, as well as public  collections including The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, Trinity College  Dublin, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Dublin City  Gallery The Hugh Lane, Ballinglen Arts Foundation and Boyle Civic Collection.