Opening reception on Thursday 12 January, 6 – 8 pm

Sonia Shiel’s installations, often composed of paintings, sculpture and video, explore the propensity of Art to be effective in the real world, while pitching mankind’s most earnest endeavours against their odd.

For her first solo show at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Shiel will present The Human Race as a contest of wins, losses and enterprise. Set against a pastoral landscape, Shiel’s pageant confronts our glib consumption of epic social atrocities by tallying the smaller stakes of human suffering. Much of this work has been made in and with thanks to The Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris.

Sonia Shiel has had solo exhibitions at Kulturbunker, Frankfurt, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin, The Black Mariah, Cork, The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Butler Gallery Kilkenny, HIAP, Helsinki and FOUR. Her most recent solo exhibition The End of the World in Pictures was commissioned by the Kulturamt Frankfurt, having received the Frankfurt Artist in Residency Program Award 2011, from Temple Bar Gallery and Studios. Recent group exhibitions include Monkey Wrench at Ormsston House Gallery, AIR at Ateliers Frankfurt and Cartoon at the Silver Cloud Gallery, London. Shiel has been the recipient of numerous awards, most notably the Hennessy Craig and Tony O’Malley Awards, as well as bursaries from The Arts Council and Culture Ireland. Upcoming solo shows include the Galway Arts Centre and Galerie Perpetuel, Frankfurt.