2018
Paul Hallahan
Paul Hallahan's practice is primarily based in painting, with an interest in contemporary non-image based abstraction.
David Eager Maher studied Fine Art (Painting) at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin, receiving a BA in 2009 and an MFA in 2011. He works mainly in painting and drawing with oil, watercolour and pencil on panel and found paper.
His work delicately considers 'possibility'. By combining a personal world view with the historicity of imagery and an awareness of contemporary visual culture, it functions as a quasi-description of time. Orchestrated like stage sets or animation background paintings, he uses imagery from the history of art, often combining historical association with the imagined. Traditional drawing and painting techniques and historical motifs are adapted and re-imagined, conjuring new narratives that traverse a host of personal and contemporary motifs. Ideas and narrative are conjured through subject matter, surfaces, materials and deliberately adapting various historic drawing techniques. Saturated with a charged opulence, his work proposes a world where gravity is ignored, distance collapses, time becomes suspended, accosted to a space of personal logic.
David Eager Maher applied for a Golden Fleece Award to assist in the realisation of two projects – an exhibition with Galerie Maurits Van Der Laar in The Hague, The Netherlands and a solo show at Pallas Projects, Dublin (both 2015) as part of their curated programme. Funding would contribute towards production, transport, travel and studio costs.