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Mutators – Kevin Mooney

Opening Reception Saturday October 1st at 1pm.

The MART Gallery, 190A Rathmines Road Lower, Dublin 6.

Exhibition Runs 1st – 21st October | Wed-Sat 1-6pm 

The MART Gallery is delighted to present Mutators, a solo exhibition by Kevin Mooney, in partnership with Sample Studios Cork and supported by The Arts Council of Ireland.  

Kevin Mooney is a Cork based artist and member of Sample-Studios. His work considers the voids which mark Irish visual culture, particularly related to Irish diasporic traditions and journeys. His paintings are like haunted tales- sometimes they are inventions, tall stories which present as artefacts from a lost culture and sometimes speculative imaginings of an alternative art history.

For Mutators, his solo exhibition in MART, curated by Sarah Kelleher, his work will expand from wall-based works to sculptures and hybrid painting/ sculptural objects. The materials of this new work- oil paint, varnish, timber, clay, jute, and iron nails, draw on the remnants of Irish folk art and folklore, blending them with influences from Europe and further afield. His ongoing research interests in historical connections between Ireland and the Caribbean has been a rich source of inspiration. This body of work reimagines artefacts that might have resulted from an integration of peoples with a shared but divergent transatlantic history.

Curator Sarah Kelleher notes in her essay in the forthcoming major publication on Mooney’s work: “His works splice recognisable Irish motifs with devices more readily associated with ritual imagery or tribal fetishes to concoct a mutant, absurdist folklore…. Mooney’s paintings are revenants, ghosts of lost futures, where we are haunted not by the spectres of an Irish visual tradition, but by its absence.

www.kevinmooney.org