Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane is delighted to present former Turner Prize nominee Stephen McKenna’s latest exhibition, Perspectives of Europe. This unique exhibition features works created throughout McKenna’s career, focusing specifically on cityscapes, parks and trees.

Perspectives of Europe opens to the public at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane on 23rd July. The artist’s deep interest in the structures which underlie the natural and built environment is displayed thematically in groups of paintings depicting classical columns, city ports and specific close-ups of verdant foliage.

Stephen McKenna has worked in several European cities and currently lives in County Carlow. This selection of paintings, from 1980 to the present, charts the artist’s experience of working in urban and rural environments and reveals his response to the cultural histories that form their identities.

Director, Barbara Dawson, said: “His is a keen and original vision which is informed by his metier –the millennia of Western mythology and its history. Alongside his paintings of cities, in this exhibition there is a focus on the artist’s love of nature in his depictions of foliage. He delights in opening his and our eyes to the poetry contained in their painterly representation – ordinary and extraordinary in their compositional structures”.

This exhibition is presented in partnership with Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, and features both national and international loans. It is open to the public until 4th October 2015. A fully illustrated catalogue is on sale in the bookshop detailing all works in both exhibitions.

Stephen McKenna was born in London in 1939. He enrolled at the Slade School of Art in 1959 and studied there until 1964. He has lived and worked throughout Europe since the 1960s, spending time in Belgium, Germany and Italy. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1986. He currently lives in County Carlow. He was elected President of the Royal Hibernian Academy from 2005 until 2009 and is a member of Aosdàna. His career has spanned over six decades, during this time he has held numerous influential solo exhibitions and his works have featured in group exhibitions in Europe and the USA.