Exciting exhibition by solo artist at Kilkenny gallery

An exciting solo exhibition by Irish artist Maurice Quillinan to  Kilkenny, titled  'Within the hour of the slowest clock' is currently showing at An Cheád Tíne Art Gallery in Kilkenny. 

Eight of the large-scale paintings feature in the exhibition recently formed a solo exhibition at Limerick Museum of Art.

Maurice Quillinan grew up in Limerick. He studied at the Limerick School of Art & Design (LSAD), the Royal College of Art, London (RCA), the Ecole Nationale Superieur des Beaux-Arts, Paris and the University of Limerick (UL). He has been a recipient of many awards, including: Limerick City Vocational Educational Scholarships (VEC) awards, The Henry Moore Foundation Scholarship, a number of Arts Council awards, Culture Ireland awards, Limerick City and County Council awards and bursaries. He has represented Ireland in exhibitions in many countries, both in one person and group events, at home and internationally. His works are held in public and private collections in thirty-four countries.

As a visual artist, Maurice Quillinan’s instinctive response to a subject that interests him is to draw it, not to make a representation, but to understand it through a ritual of repetitive mark-making. For him,he believes that it is impossible to understand anything without obsessively, rigorously drawing it over and over again. This ritual obsession negates the need for a beginning or an end, it is looking and making, work evolves from work, all that is left are the marks of having been in a particular place and time in history.

Maurice Quillinan's large format oil on linen paintings in this exhibition, began life two years ago when he and the Limerick poet Paul Sweeney met to discuss embarking on a collaborative project to see what would come out of a dialogue between poetry and painting, using the waterways around Limerick City as the main inspiration. Many discussions and two years later Paul Sweeney’s poem ‘Decastitch’ came to life along with the seven paintings in this exhibition. Both worked from either the Corbally Baths or the old Guinness Canal, which runs as an offshoot from the Shannon River near Plassey to where it meets the Abbey River next to the Absolute Hotel.

The exhibition will run at  An Cheád Tíne Art Gallery until February 18.