Pat Harris (b.1953)

Born in Dublin in 1953, he studied at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland and the Higher Institute of Fine Art, Antwerp, Belgium. While his early work was based on the human form, he has turned to still life and landscape as central motifs; here he often pares down the image to a mere tracing, a memory of its presence.

His work is represented in a number of public collections, including: The Arts Council of Ireland, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, The Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, The National Self-Portrait and Contemporary Art Collection Limerick, University College Dublin and The University of Antwerp, Belgium.

"His paintings, whether it be his small still-life's of a single object, a pumpkin, a pear, a lemon or wilting flowers, or landscapes made in the polders of Tielrode, where he lives, or in the boglands of Mayo in the west of Ireland, all exude a certain quiet beauty. A stillness and Rothko like glow that is achieved by slowly building up his paintings in thin often transparent layers of oil paint. Harris considers himself a translator; he translates the world around him into marks. And it is the marks he makes by both applying and removing the paint or, in his drawings, the charcoal, that remain to tell the story. A story of transience but also continuance, of fragile objects and places that obliquely persist, captured in the fragile surface of his marks."

Selected Group Exhibitions:
2005 SIAR 50, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
2005 Across Boundaries, touring, Ireland
2004 In the Time of Shaking, Irish Artists for Amnesty International, Irish Museum of Modern Art

Source:
Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin