Celebrated Trim-born artist returns to Meath for Solstice exhibition

Navan's Solstice Arts Centre Gallery is hosting a new large scale body of work from Trim-born artist Charles Tyrrell, who is widely respected as one of Ireland's most consistent, rigorous and proficient painters. His works on canvas and aluminium are precisely controlled explorations into the qualities of paint, and his finely textured surfaces reveal an intense enquiry into the possibilities of the medium that remains defiantly abstract. Spending his formative years in Meath, he has lived and worked in Allihies, on the Beara peninsula in west Cork, since 1984. Born in Trim in 1950, he studied at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin. His early large-scale canvases were influenced by American abstract expressionism and have since evolved in a more minimalist direction, working from detached geometric beginnings towards images that incorporate a sense of reality, a distillation of the experienced world. Currently his work practice incorporates painting on canvas and aluminium as well as drawing and print. Solo exhibitions include the Project Arts Centre, Dublin (1974, '75); West Cork Arts Centre (1990); Triskel Arts Centre (1992); Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London (1994, '98); Butler Gallery, Kilkenny (2001), and many shows at the Taylor Galleries, Dublin, over the past 30 years. The Royal Hibernian Academy's Gallagher Gallery held a 10-year retrospective of his work in 2000. Tyrrell represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale in 1982, and has exhibited in major group exhibitions in Ireland and abroad, including L'Imaginaire Irlandais, Paris (1996), the Baghdad International Festival of Art (1988), the Oireachtas Exhibition (1973-'78), the Irish Exhibition of Living Art (1972-'82), winning its Carroll's Award in 1974; and the Cagnes-sûr-Mer Painting Festival (1981), recieving a jury's special mention. He taught at the Dun Laoghaire School of Art from 1977 to 1981. He is a member of Aosdána. This new large-scale body of work on show in Navan celebrates the artist's strong connections with Meath and Cork. Patrick T Murphy, director of the Royal Hibernian Academy, officially opened the exhibition in Solstice Arts Centre last Thursday.