Opening Reception Thursday 12 January at 6pm

Three recent and diverse paintings by RHA Past President, Stephen McKenna will be on show in the RHA Foyer.

While McKenna has lived and worked in various countries since the 1960s, he has for the past decade divided his time between Ireland and Italy. A painter impervious to changing art fashions his work nonetheless achieved particular international prominence during the 80s as part of the neo-classical strain of painterly postmodernism. Yet for McKenna classicism is more a question of attitude than of subject matter. Overt pictorial references to classical antiquity gave way during the 1990s to a sophisticated exploration of the enduring value of the time-honoured genres of the still life, the interior, the landscape and the seascape.

Born in London in 1939, McKenna studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. He was guest professor for painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig, in 1995-96, and was elected to the Royal Hibernian Academy in 2001. He curated the Pursuit of Painting exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1997. His paintings demonstrate a classical approach to still lifes, landscapes and interior settings, which hint at larger narrative themes. A survey of his work from the nineties took place at the Hans und Sophie Tauber Arp Foundation, Bonn, Germany in 2000.

Solo exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1983, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1984, Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1986, Ca di Fra, Milan, 1999, Reeds Wharf Gallery, London, 1996, 95, Edward Totah Gallery, London, 1986, 85, Galleria Seno, Milan, 1986, Sander Gallery, New York, 1985, Barry Barker, London, 1979, Mestna Galerija, Ljubljiana, 1997, Orchard Gallery, Derry, 1996, 88, 81. His paintings have appeared in numerous group exhibitions in Ireland, Europe and the USA.

In 2005 a major exhibition of McKenna’s work dating from 1969 – 2004 was held as part of the Nissan Art Project at the RHA. McKenna exhibits work regularly at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. www.kerlin.ie