Hunt Contemporary
The Hunt Museum launches its contemporary art programme with an exhibition by Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh, celebrating her distinctive, internationally recognised practice and recent election to the Royal Hibernian Academy. Through this new programme the Hunt Museum aims to promote contemporary Irish art and foster a connection between the public and visual art, encouraging discussion and engagement with modern painting practices.
Bailiúchán
Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh’s solo exhibition at the Hunt Museum assembles a selection of paintings from distinct bodies of work, created over the past five years. Titled Bailiúchán, meaning collection, this exhibition makes visible recent explorations of cartography and deep mapping in which landscapes are etched and reshaped over time. Highlighting enduring interests in chronology, seriality, and the material qualities of paint, the presented works trace Ní Mhaonaigh’s semantically rich visual language across three overlapping strands: that of structure, landscape, and pure abstraction.
In recent years, Ní Mhaonaigh has presented exhibitions whose titles comprise singular words, derived from the Irish language. As a fluent Irish speaker, the artist uses this enigmatic device to examine aspects of her identity, environment, and lived experience. Examples include Struchtúr, Cnuasach, Imlíne, Eatramh, Imeall, and Ardán – which translate respectively into English as Structure, Cluster, Contour, Interval, Margin, and Platform. These seemingly limitless titles foster elaborations of bounded pictorial space, emphasising a rootedness in the Irish landscape, while gesturing towards more imaginary and timeless terrain.
Exhibition Details
- Venue: The Hunt Museum, Limerick
- Dates: 6 March – 3 April 2025
- Admission: Free admission, no charge.
Artist’s Biography
Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh is an artist based in County Wicklow whose prolific practice has been at the centre of contemporary Irish painting for over two decades. She graduated with an MA in Fine Art from Limerick School of Art and Design in 2023, and a BA in Fine Art from Dublin Institute of Technology in 2001. Ní Mhaonaigh has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, and has received various awards. Her paintings have been presented at major international art fairs and are held in many important public and private collections. Ní Mhaonaigh regularly contributes to Irish language broadcasting across radio and television, and is represented by the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, and 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, New York. She was elected an Academician of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 2023 and a member of Aosdána in 2024.
Event details
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