Following on from Spatial Notions (2005) and eyed (2007), Dermot Seymour continues to delve into his fascination with gazes, whether they are emanating from animals or the pages of newspapers and magazines. It’s said that Seymour paints humans and animals in a realist style, but perhaps that’s being too picky. The faces – scrubbed raw by the artist’s brush; metamorphosised in a mutated wide angle – are not by and large conferred status by virtue of their species. Rather, the nomenclature is as ambiguous and fantastical as ever.
Dermot Seymour was born in Belfast in 1956. He studied at The University of Ulster and is member of Áosdana He has exhibited widely in both Europe and America.
Recent shows include: The Inability to Eat Flags (solo), Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown; Dank (solo), Galway Arts Centre; An Eye for an Eye: Representations of Conflict in 20th Century Ireland, Glucksman, Cork; The Double Image, Representing Narratives in Contemporary Northern Irish Painting and Photography, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast; The Disembodied Eye: Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast; Exhibition of Contemporary Art from Ireland, European Central Bank, Frankfurt, Germany; The Happiest Country in the World, An t-Oireachtais Exhibition, curated by Cliodhna Shaffrey and Ruairi O’Cuiv; The West as Metaphor, Royal Hibernian Gallagher Gallery, Dublin, curated by Dr. Yvonne Scott and Patrick T. Murphy.
