Life Story is an animated and visually provocative installation of 100 paintings by Michael Kane. The paintings cover a very broad range of subject matter. They are rendered in ink, acrylic and collage, on arbitrary newssheet and glossy magazine pages. These paintings are overlaid on the text and images with no conscious or deliberate implications. The title, Life Story, has only a peripheral reference to the artists own life – some images that depict work-a-day minutiae are drawn from his personal lexicon. The installation as a whole is melancholy; the seemingly unrelated image strips articulate the transitory nature of most experiences, the insubstantial trivia that propel an individual and the brevity of an ordinary life. There is more than a hint of the propensity of humans to transgress: to find a slender place on the verge of society to play out fantasies or brutalities. Emptied-out concentration camps images are a motif perhaps for a shared guilt and responsibility for many world atrocities that barely graze our consciousness. The ephemera that catch the artist’s attention are also often humorous, satirical or absurd, the portrait of a goat that illegally grazed near the artists Dublin home. In all the imagery Kane’s existential message is implicit.

Michael Kane was born 1935 Wicklow, Ireland. He studied at the National College of Art & Design and Graphic Print Studio Dublin but it was his deep involvement in seminal events in Irish Art that defined him. Michael Kane helped to organise the Independent Artists exhibitions; edited the ironic art and sociopolitical journal ‘Structure’; he was a founder of Project Arts Centre and one of the earliest members of Áosdana. Over four decades he has exhibited extensively internationally and in 1996 a retrospective at Royal Hibernian Academy ran concurrently with a major exhibition of new work at The Irish Museum of Modern Art. He has exhibited regularly since 1990 at Rubicon Gallery Dublin, who published a significant Monograph on his work in 2008. He is represented in the main Public Collections in Ireland and in Private Collections throughout Europe.