Never seen before works by artist Brian Bourke for Mayo exhibition

A BODY of work spanning 40 years by one of Ireland’s most important artists, Brian Bourke, will hang together for the first time at an exhibition in the Claremorris Gallery from March 26.

Out of my Head features 30 mixed media works on paper and paintings.

Dating from 1984 to the present day, the works unveil the artist’s creative process - a process that he returns to over and again throughout his career. The work reads as a visual stream of consciousness through line and colour, an automatic, uninhibited relationship between pen and page.

The drawings represent multiple faces, with the artist’s self-portrait recurring throughout. Compositions also portray faces with striking resemblance to the artist, his family and his ancestors.

Speaking about his drawings, Connemara-based Bourke commented: “From an early age I was doing drawings and drawings and drawings and drawings and drawings. And these drawings have taken a line of their own and I follow it. The examination of the subconscious is on the sheet and what happens there is what I think. If I could explain them, I wouldn’t do them.”

He added: “There is an extraordinary privacy about it…With these little drawings, this was an entirely private affair between me and the mechanism of making work.”

Rosemarie Noone, Claremorris Gallery, said: “It is a great privilege to be able to show these extraordinary drawings which have never previously been exhibited.

“Throughout his career, Brian created these works alongside the landscapes, still lives and portraiture for which he is best known. They are a departure from studied compositions to a kind of automatic drawing. They represent a most interesting vein of the artists life’s work and are, for me, his most compelling drawings. ”

Louis de Paor, director of the Centre for Irish Studies at NUIG, said: “Brian Bourke has imagined a way of seeing that is unique to him but has the capacity to transform our way of looking so that the world is renewed and reformed, more fully itself than before.”

The show opens on March 26 and runs until April 9. Gallery hours are 1 - 6 p.m., Wednesday to Saturday or by appointment. For more, see https://claremorrisgallery.ie/.