
Felim Egan
Felim Egan was born in lreland in 1952 and studied in
Belfast and Portsmouth before attending the Slade School of Art in London.
He then spent a year at the British School at Rome in 1980 before returning
to Dublin. Egan has exhibited widely across Europe with 48 solo exhibitions
since 1979 including major shows at the lrish Museum of Modern Art,
Dublin,1996 and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, 1999. In 1981 he
represented Ireland at the Xie Biennale de Paris and in 1985 at the
San Paulo Bienal. In 1993 he won the prestigious UNESCO prize in Paris,
and in 1995 the Premiere Prize at Cagnes-sur-Mer. His work hangs in
numerous public collections including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,
the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, and the collection of the European Parliament. Major Commissions
include; Dublin Castle; O’Reilly Hall, UCD; Meeting House Square,
Temple Bar; Pavilion Theatre, Dunlaoghaire and the National Gallery
of Ireland. Felim Egan is a member of Aosdána.
He
is known as a painter of restrained eloquence. His paintings are built
up slowly with layers of thin colour applied to the surface and stone
powder ground into the acrylic. The work is universal in spirit and
at the same time emotionally intimate. His paintings are epiphanic,
in that they convey to us the essential nature or meaning of something
of which we were previously unaware. He is an abstract artist, a painter
of quite formal abstract images, and yet his work is tied to the place
he lives and works, to the long horizons, big skies and empty sands
of the Strand and sea. In this way his abstract paintings are almost
landscapes, with a magical quality that his neighbour, the poet Seamus
Heaney, has aptly described “ a balance of shifting brilliances”.

Field
dream
acrylic
& mixed media on board, 76cm x 76cm

Gamboge
Cross
acrylic
& mixed media on board, 49cm x 49cm