Solomon Fine Art is delighted to be hosting an exhibition of new paintings by Comhghall Casey. Born in 1976 in Letterkenny, Co. Donegal, Casey grew up in Omagh in Co. Tyrone before moving to Befast to study Fine Art at the University of Ulster. After graduating in 1998 he settled in Dublin where he has been living and working ever since.

Casey generally works on a small scale and his preferred subject matter is still life, portraiture and occasionally landscape. In the still life works he chooses to study mundane, deliberately ordinary, everyday objects, such as houseplants, guitars, rocks, cuts of meat, fruits or children’s toys. Each object is placed centrally against a neutral background, along the dividing line between the simple tabletop and background wall. Devoid of any narrative or meaning, Comhghall explains that in some way he is ‘trying to give an importance to these objects, to convey their tangibility, to freeze their presence’. Comhghall also produces a self-portrait every year. Like the still lives, the portrait poses are simply composed, allowing him to work on colour and composition. Yet they also raise questions of self-awareness, self-image and self-consciousness.

For such a relatively young artist, Comhghall has achieved numerous awards and accolades both in Ireland and Britain. In the UK, he won both the 1999 Young Artist of the Year and the Regional Prize (Belfast) in the nationwide Hunting Art Prize; and in 2002 and again in 2013 his self-portraits were short-listed for the prestigious UK BP National Portrait Awards. Closer to home, he has won the Best Self-Portrait Award (Emer Gallery Prize) at the Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition on three occasions and was runner up four times for the esteemed Hennessy Craig Scholarship at the Royal Hibernian Academy before winning the €10,000 prize in 2007.

2013 has already proved to be an significant year for Comhghall; firstly his ‘Self Portrait as a Cyclist’ was shortlisted from almost 2000 entrants in the prestigious BP Portrait Award and has been featured prominently on exhibition advertisements, including massive street and tube station billboards (see below). The painting was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London and is now touring to Wolverhampton and Aberdeen later in the year. Secondly, Casey’s ‘Toy Truck’ painting was selected for inclusion in this year’s celebrated Royal Academy Summer Show in London. The painting received great reviews in the UK press, including the Evening Standard, and the image was also used for for publicity purposes, with prints and postcards of the Toy Truck available in the RA Shop in Picadilly.