Irish Arts Review Summer 2025

A quarterly journal of fine art, design, architecture, photography, sculpture, heritage, decorative arts and crafts.

In this issue: The Ireland–U.S. Council and Irish Arts Review Portraiture Award at the Royal Hibernian Academy’s Annual Exhibition is in its twentieth year. Francis O’Toole takes the 2025 award, and RÓISÍN KENNEDY praises his painting, ‘which goes beyond conventional portraiture to build up several avenues of exploration’. At some three hundred acres, Marlay Park is one of the largest public parks in the greater Dublin area. PETER PEARSON commends Marlay House’s restoration and the parklands, and recounts the history of the house, built by the Huguenot La Touche banking family, in 1764.

PETER MURRAY surveys the work of sculptor Rachel Joynt, whose aesthetic, he says, has little relationship with Western tradition; In conversation with AIDAN DUNNE, artist Anita Groener tells him how she’s ‘always trying to connect the dots – to find that underlying human story’; and MICHAEL WALDRON considers the history and legacy of the Munster Fine Art Society. JOSEPH McBRINN welcomes the National Gallery of Ireland’s exhibition on Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett, artists whose role in the development of Cubism and abstraction in Ireland, he believes, has been underplayed; MARGARITA CAPPOCK looks at artist Barbara Knežević’s current exhibition of work, which is influenced by her past; and BERNARD MEEHAN highlights illustrations in a manuscript of the gospels created by Irish monks in a Swiss abbey in the 8th century. 

American artist Helen Hooker O’Malley found inspiration in the West of Ireland. STEPHANIE McBRIDE writes that her extensive body of photographs from the 1930s onwards emphasise her centrality in the history of Irish photography; and fellow American Sam Gilliam’s residency at the Ballinglen Foundation in Co Mayo in the 1990s resulted in colourful landscape ‘drapes’, as JOHN BEARDSLEY discloses.

Elsewhere in the issue, there’s EAMONN MAXWELL on Fergus Fitzgerald and FRANCIS HALSALL on Zsolt Basti; PATRICK BOWE outlines the design features of three historic Irish gardens, now only remembered through watercolours; and Cecilia Danell tells NIAMH NicGHABHANN COLEMAN that she likes to think of her landscape paintings as ‘creating a place’ rather than ‘painting a place’. 

Published by Irish Arts Review
Softcover
120 pages
300 x 230 mm
ISBN 9771649217104