Tony O'Malley | Modern and Contemporary Art

Tony O’Malley (1913-2003) was not appreciated by his native Ireland until a few years before his death. Today he is a household name in Irish art circles and hailed as one of its leading contemporary abstract painters; he was honoured by the Irish President in 1993 and awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College Dublin the following year.

He began as a bank clerk learning his art ‘surreptitiously’ and as a result of contracting tuberculosis, he was cut off from outside influences inventing his own visual vocabulary and independence of spirit. He soon moved to St Ives in Cornwall for health reasons, where he became a full-time painter and an important part of its highly creative artistic community, particularly enjoying the close friendship and critical support of the renowned artist Patrick Heron.

O’Malley is known for his distinctive exuberant style. The piece offered here is typical of the paintings he created on his regular winter sojourns in the Bahamas, full of rich and vibrant life-affirming colours reminiscent of tropical flowers and fruit. The Irish Museum of Modern Art staged a major retrospective of his work in 2005.

Tony O’Malley, untitled

Signed, dated 1988

11 July, 2018