Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh

(b. 1977) lives and works in Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland. 
"The seductive attraction of the painting lies in their extrovertly taciturn quality, and by the way in which the gutsy, even aggressive application of colour is countered by the sensitive, even delicately tentative, scoring of the paint in all its precise and potent hues. Rare is it to see paint being worked so sensually and yet often so brutally. The juicy colours push and pull, and the eye is caught in an impossible impasse - are we gazing onto boundless unlimited and infinite space, or are we peering into claustrophobically constraining, sealed and hermetic compartments from which nothing can leak? Can we simultaneously do both?Ní Mhaonaigh's involved and tactile approach - with its implications of cathartic release and metaphysical intensity - generates images that, packed and agitated as they are, ultimately function as investigations into the sublime, Kant split his concept of the sublime into three categories, the petrifying sublime, sometimes accompanied with a certain dread or melancholy; the noble sublime inspiring quiet wonder; the splendid sublime, pervaded with beauty. One need only gaze at Ní Mhaonaigh's paintings - packed complex, luxurious, transfixing - to see a simultaneous evocation of not one but all these facets of the sublime, held perpetually in tension and in unison."

 http://www.kevinkavanaghgallery.ie/Artists.aspx

- Pádric E. Moore, extract from; Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh (2010)