Brian Bourke: Evocations

This selection of works by Brian Bourke brings together several of the enduring themes that have shaped his remarkable career: landscape, portraiture, the human figure and the observed world, transformed through an intensely personal and imaginative vision. From atmospheric studies of trees and rural landscapes to expressive portraits, nude studies and more enigmatic compositions, these works demonstrate Bourke’s ability to move effortlessly between observation and invention. His paintings are rooted in the places, people and objects encountered in everyday life, yet are often charged with a sense of drama, memory and fictional narrative. A distinctive and influential figure in Irish art, Bourke has exhibited widely in Ireland and internationally, representing Ireland at the Paris Biennale and the Lugano Exhibition of Graphics in 1965. He is a member of Aosdána and an Honorary Member of the Royal Hibernian Academy. The works gathered here reflect the breadth of a practice in which the familiar is continually made strange, and the ordinary world becomes the starting point for something more elusive and deeply personal.