Patrick Hall has lived in the wind-swept County Sligo, Ireland for the last thirty years, working with a quiet profundity. His work reflects a lifetime of learning and the wisdom that comes from experience, as well as a certain sadness that accompanies that sagacity. Although highly regarded by numerous artists, writers, and poets in Ireland, Hall’s work remains relatively unknown elsewhere.
Hall’s approach to painting changed after a bereavement in the late 1980s. The devastation caused by that personal loss and the broader context of the global AIDS epidemic greatly informed his subsequent practice. The deceptive simplicity of Hall’s paintings and the delicacy with which he handles pen and ink belie the emotional intensity and impact of these works. Pleasure and pain, possession and loss, inner and outer worlds, are all simultaneously evoked along with the transience and absurdity of human life.
Born in 1935 in Co Tipperary, Patrick Hall studied at the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art and Design in London. Solo exhibitions include the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Butler Gallery, Kilkenny; Green on Red Gallery, Dublin; the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin. Hall’s works are included in many private and public collections including the Arts Council of Ireland, the Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. He was appointed a member of Aosdána in 1982; the name derives from the Gaelic “aos dána” meaning, people of the arts or people of wisdom. Hall currently lives and works in Co. Sligo.
[excerpted from Fergus McCaffrey website: www.fergusmccaffrey.com]