Taylor Galleries announced the death today of long-term gallery artist Janet Mullarney RHA. She died at her home in Italy early this morning following a long illness. Acclaimed as one of the foremost sculptors of her generation, Janet was born in Dublin in 1952 and left for Italy as a young woman, studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti (1970-74) and Scuola Professionale di Intaglio (1982-83) in Florence. She divided her time between Ireland and rural Tuscany for the rest of her life.
Taylor in a statement said Mullarney’s practice was defined by a material bravura that saw her combine bronze, foam, glass, rubber, papier maché, textiles, terracotta, plaster, wax, to form idiosyncratic figurative works that interrogate the human condition. Simultaneously playful, purposeful, experimental and elusive, her sculptures and their meanings, like Janet herself, defy easy categorisation. Instead, they represent a singular artistic vision, the distillation of a life’s work.
Janet Mullarney exhibited her work extensively in Ireland and abroad, and she has been represented by Taylor Galleries since the 1990s. A member of Aosdána and the Royal Hibernian Academy, in addition to numerous grants and funding awards she received a Pollock Krasner Award (1998), the Irish-American Institute’s O’Malley Art Award (2005), RHA Sculpture Award (2008) and RUA Perpetual Sculpture Award (2009). A major exhibition of new work, My Mind’s i, travelled to several Irish venues in 2015-16, and a retrospective survey show, Then and Now: Janet Mullarney, was presented at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2019. A catalogue raisonné of her work edited by Mary Ryder and Catherine Marshall was published by Irish Academic Press last year.
