dlr County Council is delighted to present A mobile living thing by Brian Fay, an artist based in Dún Laoghaire. The focus of this solo exhibition is a response to four small paintings by Irish artist Mainie Jellett in the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Collection.

These works on paper by Jellet from 1932 to 1939 mark a change in her artwork from abstraction to a return to more naturalistic forms of painting.  Brian Fay has made a series of new drawings that respond to the physical properties of these works as they slowly age, and to the life of Jellett herself. Together they can be seen as a reflection on time, both clock time and our own lived time. The title of the exhibition ‘A mobile living thing’ comes from Jellett’s writings on the making of painting and here Fay uses it to consider these four paintings as having a life and afterlife of their own.  The exhibition features Fay’s new drawings and the four paintings by Mainie Jellett.

An Cathaoirleach, Cllr Lettie McCarthy said “we are really pleased to host this wonderful exhibition of Brian’s work. It is especially interesting to see him respond directly to the works of Mainie Jellet in the dlr County Collection”.

Brian Fay is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at TU Dublin. Using drawing he examines the materiality of pre-existing artworks and objects to consider our complex relationships to time. He exhibits nationally and internationally and has recently been invited onto the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Residency Programme, USA in 2022. His work is in the Arts Council Collection, National Drawing Collection, Crawford Art Gallery, DLR Art Collection and the Office of Public Works. He the winner of the 2014 Derwent International Drawing Prize and the 2016 AXA Drawing Prize.