Michael Mulcahy

Michael Mulcahy was born in Cork in the south of Ireland and studied at the Crawford School of Art, Cork and at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. He worked briefly as a sculptor and as a performance artist before coming to prominence as a painter in 1981. During the ensuing decade he developed a bold and exciting figurative style characterised by loud vivid colours and an aggressive assertiveness. A dominant theme was of the artist himself as a voyager into uncharted regions of the world and of the mind. This aspect of his work was mirrored by his real life expeditions to far-flung and remote parts of the globe including the Western Sahara, the Australian outback, Papua New Guinea, Mali and Northern India. In all of these places he not only identified with the geography and nature of the locations but he also empathised with the local culture and history of the peoples he encountered, and motifs and images from these travels have marked his work. Since 1992 and a trip to South Korea Mulcahy's work has undergone a certain change of direction which has brought him to produce a body of paintings and drawings in a meditative and lyrical non-figurative abstract style.