Contemporary Irish Artists: Who Is Painting Ireland Now
Contemporary Irish art is the work being made in Ireland and by Irish artists abroad now, and it grew out of a break that happened in 1943, when a group of modernists set up their own exhibition because the established one would not show them. This guide traces that line from the Living Art generation to the artists on the international circuit today, and says where you can see their work.
It is a different story from the one most of this site tells. Our range is mostly the Irish painters of the 18th to mid-20th century, so this is a map of where those artists lead, not a shop window.
The break that started it: Living Art, 1943
In 1943 Mainie Jellett helped found the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, alongside Norah McGuinness, Evie Hone and Louis le Brocquy among others. It was a response to the Royal Hibernian Academy, whose annual show had rejected work by modernists, and the new exhibition was open to artists whatever their school or style. Jellett and McGuinness were its first two presidents. In 1972 the original organisers handed it to a younger generation, and it remains a showcase for contemporary art.
Jellett's own pictures show why it mattered. Her abstract work of the 1920s and 1930s was the first serious Irish engagement with cubism and abstraction, and you can read more in our guides to how cubism reached Ireland and Irish abstract art, or on her artist page. Women did much of the early work, and the Living Art circle shows it.
Ireland on the world stage
Ireland first sent work to the Venice Biennale in 1950, with Norah McGuinness and Nano Reid. Louis le Brocquy returned in 1956 and won one of that year's major prizes. After 1960 there was a long gap, and the country came back in 1993 with Dorothy Cross and Willie Doherty. The decades since have brought Kathy Prendergast, Gerard Byrne, Richard Mosse, Jesse Jones, Eva Rothschild, Niamh O'Malley and Eimear Walshe, among others.
This year the Irish representative is Isabel Nolan, whose project Dreamshook, mixing sculpture, painting, drawing and tapestry, runs at the Arsenale until 22 November 2026. Much of this work is installation, film or sculpture, which is why a picture-led shop cannot do it justice, and why it is worth seeing in person.
Painting did not go away
It is easy to think contemporary art means no paintings, but painting has stayed central. Sean Scully, born in Dublin in 1945, is among the best-known abstract painters of his generation, and landscape continues as a living tradition. The fiddles, coastlines and writers in the work of Barra Ó Maoláin, the living artist whose own pictures are part of this store, sit in that tradition, with Fair Head and Connemara in place of Achill.
The bridge: Evie Hone
Between the founders and today sits the generation that learned from them. Evie Hone, a founder of the Living Art exhibition and better known as a stained-glass artist, painted quietly structured landscapes late in life, such as the 1943 picture below.
Where to see Irish art made now
The Irish Museum of Modern Art opened on 25 May 1991 in the 17th-century Royal Hospital Kilmainham, and holds the national collection of modern and contemporary art, more than 3,500 works from after 1940. The Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin shows modern and contemporary work, including Francis Bacon's relocated studio. The Royal Hibernian Academy, the institution the Living Art group stepped away from, still holds its annual exhibition and now shows contemporary work too. Commercial galleries such as the Kerlin in Dublin represent many of the artists named above.
Living with it
If you like the idea of contemporary Irish art but want something for a wall at a modest price, the Modern Irish Art Prints collection and the Irish abstract art collection are the nearest we have. For the whole range, start from the Irish art prints hub.