Official launch of NUI Galway Art Collection Website by Emeritus Professor Jim Ward:

Tuesday, May 21 3pm at the NUI Galway Art Gallery, Quadrangle Building - all welcome, free admission, refreshments served!   

NUI Galway, houses a significant collection of Irish and international art, both traditional and contemporary.  NUI Galway supports local, national and international artists by hosting exhibitions throughout the year and purchasing pieces for the collection.  Currently the university owns over 500 works of art, a number of which have been kindly donated. They are distributed across various buildings, where they enrich the surroundings of staff, students and visitors.  A lot of the pieces are displayed in accessible locations and most are available for viewing by the public.  The new website will display images of all the artworks from the collection including background information and artists' biographies.

May 15 to June 7: Thomas Ryan, PPRHA - exhibition of Selected Works, watercolours and oil paintings.

Venue: Mechanical Soils Laboratory (adjacent to Áras na Mac Léinn)

The exhibition was officially launched by Gearóid O’Conluain, Academic Secretary to the University on Tuesday, May 14 5pm.  The artist, Thomas Ryan PPRHA, was in attendance.

NUI Galway proudly presents a retrospective of the work of Thomas Ryan PPRHA, prolific Irish artist, who works in oils, pastels, pencil, charcoal and watercolour, and has been painting for over 60 years. Selected Works runs from 15 May to 7 June in the Mechanical Soils Lab, adjacent to Áras na Mac  Léinn and is open to the public Monday to Saturday, 11am to 4pm daily.

The exhibition of Selected Works, selected by the Artist, Thomas Ryan and the Arts & Theatre Office, NUI Galway, includes two of his large historical paintings, ’ The Flight of the Earls’ and ’ G.P.O. 1916’, both oil on canvas and painted in the great European Tradition.  These paintings normally hang inside Dublin Castle and Leinster House, respectively, and have been generously loaned by the artist and the Institutions.  Tom Ryan is renowned for imaginative re-workings of historical and religious episodes and he is also heralded as an important chronicler of the changing face of Ireland, through his portraiture, and paintings of exteriors and interiors of buildings.

On show at NUI Galway, are portraits, self-portraits, religious paintings, interiors, still lives and landscapes, many loaned from the artist’s home, for this ’retrospective’ of his career.   Two portrait highlights on show are a pastel drawing, ’ Seán Keating, aged 82 years’ and a drawing of the late Professor of Marine Science , ’Padraic O’Céidigh’, which is part of the NUI Galway Collection.  In addition, there is a selection of watercolours from a recent project, Dublin and Thereabouts, when Thomas Ryan painted the buildings and places that took his fancy in Dublin, 2010-2011, all painted directly from the subject, and mostly in one sitting.

Thomas Ryan, born in Limerick in 1929, trained in the School of Art, Limerick under Richard Butcher and at the National College of Art & Design, under Seán Keating and Maurice MacGonigal. 

Thomas Ryan was President of Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts from 1982 to 1992, is a Founder Member of the European Council of National Academies of Fine Art (Madrid), and an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy, London and Scottish Academy, Edinburgh.  His work hangs in major collections and he was the designer of the one pound coin and millennium fifty pence.  He lives in County Meath, and produces most of his work in his studio. All welcome.  Free entry.

Links: http://irishartsreview.com/irisartsreviyear/pdf/1997/20492949.pdf.bannered.pdf

http://www.rhagallery.ie/

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