We are delighted to announce the upcoming solo exhibition by Maurice Quillinan at An Chéad Tine in Kilkenny "Within the hours of the slowest clock". Eight of these large-scale paintings recently formed a solo exhibition at the Limerick Museum of Art.
Maurice Quillinan grew up in Limerick. He studied at the Limerick School of Art & Design (LSAD), the Royal College of Art, London (RCA), the Ecole Nationale Superieur des Beaux-Arts, Paris & the University of Limerick (UL). He has been a recipient of many awards, including Limerick City Vocational Educational Scholarships (VEC) awards, The Henry Moore Foundation Scholarship, a number of Arts Council awards, Culture Ireland awards, Limerick City and County Council awards and bursaries. At home and internationally, he has represented Ireland in exhibitions in many countries, both in one-person and group events. His works are held in public & private collections in thirty-four countries.
As a visual artist, Maurice Quillinan’s instinctive response to a subject that interests him is to draw it, not to make a representation, but to understand it through a ritual of repetitive mark-making. For him, he believes that it is impossible to understand anything without obsessively, and rigorously drawing it over and over again. This ritual obsession negates the need for a beginning or an end, it is looking & making, work evolves from work, and all that is left are the marks of having been in a particular place & time in history.
Maurice Quillinan's large format oil on linen paintings in this exhibition, began life two years ago when he and the Limerick poet Paul Sweeney met to discuss embarking on a collaborative project to see what would come out of a dialogue between poetry and painting, using the waterways around Limerick City as the main inspiration. After many discussions and two years later Paul Sweeney’s poem ‘Decastitch’ came to life along with the seven paintings in this exhibition. Both worked from either the Corbally Baths or the old Guinness Canal, which runs as an offshoot from the Shannon River near Plassey to where it meets the Abbey River next to the Absolute Hotel.
"Within the hours of the slowest clock" will be opened on Jan 18th 2025 at 3pm by Eamon Colman with a poem by Paul Sweeney.