Corbel - Enclave Series - 2021Private Collection, London
Cadogan Gallery, London: July/August 2023
Solo Exhibition - Cadogan Gallery, Milan: Spring 2024
Invitation Only Exhibition - Burren, Co. Clare: May 25 - June 03 2024
Richard Hearns paints in the wild landscape of The Burren National Park in County Clare, Ireland. Each painting is an extension of his physical surroundings - earth, sea and sky - materialising the artist’s experiences and memories of colour and natural phenomena. Born in Beirut and raised in Ireland, Hearns is deeply aware of the unique cultural backgrounds of both aspects of his heritage. Articulated in his abstract paintings, his experiences and connections with the traditions of these separate locations and cultures combine to form a triangular history. He endeavours to express his understandings of exploration, discovery and identity through the medium of paint.
Hearns' paintings document a search for an idyll. Meditative layers are applied in a physical expression of form drawn from the rhythmic nature of rural life. His work is palpably physical: marks are an extension of his arm, the canvases mirror his height, and his energy is channelled through the brush onto the canvas. The exuberant colours of his works express his experiences of nature and its intensity, inviting the viewer to participate in this celebration of memory, colour and form. Only an allusion to landscape, Hearns' raw, indecipherable marks drive the composition to the edge of the canvas creating a distinct language of undulation, recession and space.
My dual heritage has greatly influenced and inspired my paintings.
The Irish have always had an outward looking perspective and a
unique identity in the world. Likewise, throughout history, the
Lebanese people have covered great expanses in order to explore,
learn, trade and grow.
- Richard Hearns
SELECTED SOLO SHOWS | |
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2024 | Solo Show, Cadogan Gallery, Milan |
2023 | Sheshia Retrospective, Clare, Ireland |
2022 | ‘Nomad’, Cadogan Gallery, London |
2021 | ‘Enclave’, Cadogan Gallery, London |
2019 | ‘The Cardinal’s Portrait’ The Sheen Centre for Thought and Culture, New York |
2018 | ‘Journey’, Cadogan Gallery, London |
2016 | 'Where Your Treasure Is' The Sheen Centre for Thought and Culture, New York |
2014 | ‘Raw/Cooked: Last of the Summer Mackerel’, Galerie La Cornue, Paris |
2013 | 'The Rural Idyll' Jorgensen Fine Art, Dublin |
2012 | ‘Paintings by Richard Hearns’, Offices of the Cardinal of New York, New York |
2007 | ‘Towards an Island’, Wonksiri Gallery, Koh Mak, Trad Provience, Thailand |
GROUP SHOWS | |
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2022 | Sotheby's New Bond Street Galleries, London |
2022 | Sotheby’s at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Gallagher Gallery, 15 Ely Place, Dublin |
2022 | Groundzero360, Houston Baptist Universty, Houston, Texas |
2017 | ‘Iomramh’, Espronceda Center for Arts and Culture, Barcelona |
2014 | Kunstler International Symposium, Villa Bohm, Neustradt an der Weinstrasse, Germany |
2013 | VUE, Royal Hibernian Academy, Gallagher Gallery, 15 Ely Place, Dublin |
2012 | The 182nd Royal Hibernian Academy Annual Exhibition, 15 Ely Place, Dublin |
EDUCATION | |
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2004 | H DIP Art Craft and Design Education NCAD |
2002 | BFA Fine Art Interdisciplinary Digital Media IADT |
2001 | DIPLOMA Fine Art Interdisciplinary Digital Media IADT |
AWARDS & RESIDENCIES | |
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2015 |
Abstract Painting at the
Kunstakademie, Bad Reichenhall, Germany Selected to present work to the Prince of Wales on behalf of the Burren College of Art and NUI Galway Artist in residence, Nave 12, Barcelona, Spain |
2014 | International Artist Symposium, City of Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, Germany 2012 |
2012 | The Art Students League of New York, USA |
2011 |
Artist in residence, Custom House Studios, Westport Quay, Co.
Mayo Fingal County Enterprise Board, Export Grant Initiative Award |
2010 | Artist in residence, Cill Rialaig Foundation, Bolas Head, Co. Kerry |
2009 | Artist in residence, The Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan, Co. Clare |
2006 | Artist in residence, The Mantua Art Project, Mantua Co. Roscommon |
COLLECTIONS |
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Irish State Collection |
Galgorm Group, N. IRE |
St Patrick's Cathedral, NYC |
Naomi House Children's Hospice, UK |
Aston Wealth Management, IRE |
ITC company, IRE |
SEPIL, IRE |
Richard Hearns carrying Tome (2021) at the Burren National Park, County Clare, Ireland, 2021
Demonstrating the artist’s distinct command of raw mark-making that drives the composition to the threshold of the landscape, Enclave can be read as an exceptional tribute to the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, a term used by Alfred H. Barr Jr. in 1929 to characterize the non-representational paintings of Vasily Kandinsky. While these paintings by Hearns recall the visual syntax of such modernist masters as Arshile Gorky due to their sweeping drips, Franz Kline due to their gestural bravura, and Mark Rothko due to their blurred edges, it is perhaps a number of paintings by Willem de Kooning executed in the late fifties through 1960 with which the recent works of Hearns conjure up the most powerful aesthetic interactions.
Action Painting, the term coined by the art critic Harold Rosenberg in 1953 to characterize the immediacy of the painter’s handling of the brush to produce gestural traces upon the surface of the canvas, remains inseparable from our interpretation of the paintings of the Enclave series. In his pivotal article “The American Action Painters,” Rosenberg notes, “The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter. … Art as action rests on the enormous assumption that the artist accepts as real only that which he is in the process of creating.” Rosenberg’s emphasis on the process of painting as an end in itself sheds light on the aesthetic directions of such modernist painters as Gorky, Kline, Rothko and de Kooning. Having assimilated formalist elements from the visual syntax of these modernist masters with supreme fluency, Hearns expands the potentialities of Abstract Expressionism. With its pictorial allusiveness to the landscape genre, barely decipherable phantoms of architectonic forms, colored materiality and recurrent architectural titles, the distinct pictorial language of Hearns redefines and reinvents the expressive possibilities of the medium of oil on canvas through its singular set of parameters. This preoccupation of the artist with pairing nature and architecture abstractly and linguistically reactivates the historical and phenomenological questions posed by Filippo Brunelleschi’s so-called scientific perspective. While Hearns “registers,” “records” and “marks” his observations of the atmospheric fluctuations within nature and upon architectural surfaces and forms, he also “registers,” “records” and “marks” his observations of painting’s own historical and conceptual fluctuations.
Richard Hearns carrying Tome (2021) at the Burren National Park, County Clare, Ireland, 2021
December 13 2022
Link to articleBy Niall MacMonagle, December 04 2022
Link to articleBy Cian O Brion, October 4, 2020
Link to articleBy Paraic McMahon, September 2019
Link to articleSeptember 13 2018
Link to articleBy Seth Jacobson, November 1 2018
Link to articleBy Kevin Cullen, April 15 2016
Link to articleBy Hilary A White, December 28 2015
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