Cian mclaughlin

Cian mcloughlin facts
Born in 1977, McLoughlin is an architecture graduate who went on to take a masters in film studies in UCD. He recently completed an MFA at the National College.
Cian McLoughlin is a Dublin based artist.

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McLoughlin is a multidisciplinary artist whose work fuses traditional art materials and techniques with modern tools and technologies. Oil paint, pastels, and canvas are used in combination with CO2 laser cutters, 3D printers, graphics generators, and digital colour systems. He examines the transformative impact of technology on painting, creating visual scenarios where no single, valid interpretation exists, offering insights into the processes underlying perception and subjective experience. His work aims to understand humans as embodied, interdependent continua of psycho-physical processes and to provide a perspective on the challenge of being emotional creatures in a mathematical world.

We're publishing a hardback book on the work to coincide with the show. The introductory text by Tom Lordan can be read below.

The relationship between perception and the perceptible lies at the core of Cian McLoughlin’s newest works, and this relationship is posed in several senses. More specifically, to render the relationship tangible, McLoughlin’s paintings negotiate thr

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Cian McLoughlin was born in 1977 in Dublin, Ireland. He graduated from University College of Dublin in 2002.

McLoughlin’s paintings focus on portraits and urban architecture. McLoughlin often uses vibrant, unconventional colors for his portraits, such as pure neon orange and lemon yellow. In contrast, his urban landscape paintings feature a more somber palette. His work shows extreme fluidity and intuitive brush marks that come together loosely to form the features of his sitters that are just decipherable enough through the haphazard myriad of brushstrokes. McLoughlin’s subjects vary from homeless, Irish emigrants to self-portraits, to family members. McLoughlin’s mother, also a painter, influenced him greatly to become a painter himself. He also works with chalk on paper, similar to his paintings in the unconventional skin colors paired with precise draftsmanship.

Cian McLoughlin has exhibited in both in the US and in Ireland. McLoughlin was included the 150th Anniversary of the National Portrait Gallery in London, and was awarded the Don

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Cian McLoughlin

Tronie (Woman Leaning Forward), 2017

Oil on board, 50 x 70 cm

"This work is part of a series of semi-abstract heads I have been working on for a number of years. Tronie is a Dutch art historical term (literally meaning 'head', 'face' or 'countenance') for certain types of head paintings from the Flemish Baroque and Dutch Golden Age. Tronies were not intended as portraits. Rather, they were
meant as studies of expression, type, physiognomy, or any kind of interesting character. Like portraits, tronies were made from living models, but they did not focus on the portrayal of a particular person complete with indicative props and context. Instead, they freely explored the spectrum of human appearance and emotional expression. It is in reinterpreting the term in my own practice that a new approach to subject has developed. The first of these tronies was exhibited in the Hennessy Portrait Awards 2014 in the National Gallery. In May 2015 this body of work was the subject of a talk I delivered, also in the National Gall