Artists In Conversation: Encounters with Jellett

A special in-conversation event with artists Susan Connolly and Brian Fay. 

The pioneering work of Mainie Jellett continues to excite and inspire artists today. On the occasion of our summer exhibition, Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. The Art of Friendship, we are delighted to welcome two artists, Susan Connolly and Brian Fay, to speak about the direct influence Jellett has had on their artistic careers to date. The discussion, followed by a Q & A session, will be chaired by Sarah McAuliffe, Curator of Irish Art Post 1900 at the National Gallery of Ireland. 

Susan Connolly is an award-winning artist and lecturer who has exhibited in solo and groups shows in Ireland and internationally. She lectures at SETU Waterford and completed her practice lead PhD at Ulster University in 2018. Her recent exhibition, GROUND (100+one) considered what one hundred plus one years of abstraction on the island of Ireland could mean for Irish painting today. Taking Mainie Jellett’s celebrated painting, Decoration (1923) as the work that first introduced an Irish audience to abstraction, Connolly set herself the task of making 100 paintings on canvas as an homage but more importantly as a way to tease out and make visible questions that have intrigued her own established abstract painting practice.

Brian Fay is an Irish artist living in Dublin, his practice is rooted in drawing and he uses the materiality of pre-existing artworks and objects to examine our complex relationship to time.  He recently completed a national touring survey show opening at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda then to Limerick City Gallery of Art and Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Cork. In 2022 he undertook an artist residency at the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation, Connecticut, USA. Fay’s 2021 exhibition A Mobile Living Thing at Municipal Gallery dlr Lexicon formed a response to four small paintings by Mainie Jellett in the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Collection. These works on paper made between 1932 and 1939 mark a shift in her practice, moving from abstraction to a more naturalistic form of painting. Fay made a series of new drawings that responded to the physical properties of these works as they slowly age, and to the life of Jellett herself.