Artists
Art plays an important role in the interiors of the building. Three well known artists have been commissioned to create artworks for the three main public areas. These will be complimented by other pieces of similar quality throughout. A guide to the artworks will be available to visitors to enhance this appreciation of the paintings. The three principal artists are:
THE ICE HOUSE ARTISTS
Charles Tyrrell
At the time of Charles Tyrrell’s ten year retrospective at the R.H.A, Dublin in 2001. Patrick T. Murphy, Director wrote:
“Charles Tyrrell is probably the best painter of his generation in Ireland. It was a generation forged between a belief in painting and it’s possibilities and the rigour of conceptualist and minimalist strategies of the early seventies. For the past fifteen years he has resided in a remote area of Ireland where the intensity of his exploration into paint’s non rational and rational qualities have produced work anything but remote from the essential artistic questions of our time.”
Martin Gale
Martin Gale has occupied an important place in Irish art since the 1980s. A realist painter, whose subject matter stems from the conventions of landscape and still life he may be, but his work is far from ordinary. He engages with the interaction between subjective perception and objective observation. His landscapes eschew the picturesque and the romantic, opting instead for the keen depiction of life as it is lived in the country.
John Devlin
Born in Dublin in 1950, a contemporary of Tyrrell and Gale, John Devlin has moved from being a renowned illustrator in the USA to a super-realistic painter. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions including in the RHA. His work is both readily accessible and challenging with often a mixture of humour and a darker undercurrent.
