Opening Reception Tuesday 10 September at 7pm

Meath County Council Arts Office is delighted to launch an exhibition of work by Dermot McNevin in the Toradh Gallery, Ashbourne Library and Cultural Centre on Tuesday September 10th at 7pm. The exhibition runs until October 8th.

The Toradh Gallery, in the Ashbourne Library and Cultural Centre, is proud to have hosted exhibitions by local, national and international artists as well as touring exhibitions from the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Arts Council.

Dermot McNevin graduated with 1st class honours from the DIT School of Fine Art in 1996, and has since completed two residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, Co. Monaghan. ‘All that remains of soldiers’ dreams’ is Dermot’s third solo show; he has previously exhibited at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin and the Alley Arts Centre, Tyrone. He has also exhibited in a number of group exhibitions.

Dermot’s work is concerned with subjective experience and is suffused with the theme of belonging. He starts out by using motifs from the landscape, the human body, or the written word, as a way in to the painting.

Dermot uses paint in a visceral and expressive way to explore the tensions and duality of our inner and outer worlds. His work refers to the actual landscape and imagined landscape. In exploring the hard and contradictory beauty that we see all around us, he attempts to make the paintings work in a spacious, abstract way. He believes that reality is both constructed by ourselves and also revealed through our life experiences. Similarly his approach to painting embraces this duality and is both additive and subtractive; physically working the paintings to both construct and reveal the experience that the finished painting will become.

‘I try to achieve a balance between the knowledge that we learn in Art College with the experiential insight that takes place through the creative process. I’m attempting to shine some light on our human experience; our beautiful, sometimes painful vulnerability, and ultimately the life affirming and resilient connections that run through all life.’

– Dermot McNevin