Seán McSweeney: Land and Sea

4 - 27 October 2012

Since moving to the west of Ireland in the 1980s the Sligo coastline has become a recurring leitmotif in Seán McSweeney's work, which is firmly rooted in the tradition of Irish landscape painting that stretches back to the 1800s. He returns frequently to the same subjects and is consistently drawn to the small bog pools and flat shorelines close to his home, painting them in different lights and in different seasons. McSweeney's paintings verge on abstraction, with bog pools viewed from above reduced to rectangles and the coastline represented by horizontal bands of richly applied colour that demarcate land, sea and sky.

Land and Sea features a selection of new and recent works on canvas that see McSweeney turning his back on the stagnant bog pools and instead focusing his gaze on the North Atlantic. The result is an intense examination of the changing moods and movements of the sea along the spectacular Sligo coast.