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Viewing for Whyte’s Irish and International art sale gets underway today at the RDS. There is art by Jack B. Yeats, Paul Henry, Patrick Heron, Louis le Brocquy, Norah McGuinness, Sean Keating, Patrick Scott, Grace Henry, Peter Curling, Howard Helmick, John Behan, Patrick O’Reilly, Edward Delaney and a wide variety of other acclaimed painters and sculptors. Viewing is from 10 am to 5 pm for the next three days and the auction is at 6 pm on Monday.
STEPHEN MCKENNA – Pyrrhus from 2012, an oil on canvas.
THE life and legacy of artist Stephen McKenna, who died in May, is celebrated in an exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin. London born he studied at The Slade in the 1960’s and settled in Carlow in the 1990’s. He was one of the first artists exhibited at Kerlin on its founding in 1988 and he continued to show there for almost 30 years.
This celebratory show brings together a selection of paintings produced within the last decade of his life and includes landscapes, still life, domestic interiors and street scenes. His work is represented in the collections of IMMA, the Tate, London, Berlinische Galeries, the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels and in many private and public collections. The exhibition will close with a celebratory event as part of the Dublin Gallery weekend on Sunday, November 25.
Stephen McKenna (1939–2017) Photo credit: Amelia Stein
The death of artist Stephen McKenna has been announced by The Kerlin Gallery. The London born artist studied at The Slade in the 1960’s. Rather than conforming to the era’s dominant trends of pop art and conceptualism, he defied expectation by turning instead to figurative painting – unfashionable in London at that time – and began to develop a unique painterly practice informed by diverse art historical precedents.
He moved to Germany in 1971 and, after living and working in numerous European countries, settled in Co. Carlow in the 1990’s. The impact of this extensive continental travel is evident in McKenna’s painting, not only in its subject matter – though European cityscapes and landscapes are frequently represented – but in the lyricism of his approach, artfully fusing classical and romantic painting traditions. He died in Co. Carlow on May 4.
