Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 25th September 2024

70 52 STEPHEN MCKENNA PPRHA (1939 - 2017) Basket and Vessels (1996) Oil on canvas, 100 x 150cm (39.5 x 59’’) Signed; also signed, dated 1996, and with artist’s oeuvre number K964 verso € 10,000 - 15,000 Almost invariably, Stephen McKenna’s paintings have a resoundingly matter-of-fact character. They are forthrightly representational and he wants us to be in no doubt as to what is being represented. His definite sense of purpose was hard won. When he graduated from the Slade in London in the mid-1960s he was half-heartedly pur- suing an abstract line of exploration because, as he later saw it, he was temperamen- tally unsuited to Pop art and conceptualism, the emerging, dominant trends of the time. In the event, the same applied to abstraction, and he gradually found his feet as a representational painter of the world around him, with his roots very much in the classical tradition. He gravitated towards some of the Italian ‘metafisica’ painters and fully agreed with Carlo Carra’s proposition that today’s painters should apply Renaissance methods to their contemporary world. He lived for a time in Germany, and then in Italy, before settling in Ireland in the late 1990s. While he was perpetually fascinated by the perceived division between the notionally industrious north of Europe and the sybaritic south as symbolised in Friedrich Overbeck’s allegorical 19th century painting Italia and Germania, one feels the south captured his heart. This crisply observed still life nods to both Italia and Germania. It is delivered with the clarity of a de Chirico, and it luxuriates in the forms, textures and materials of the objects gathered within the composition. All of those objects are venerable products of centuries of civilization, streamlining form and function, beauty and utility, designed to make life better. At the same time, the basket and all the vessels we see are conspicuously empty, as though reminding us that the quality of life they promise in their intended functions requires a great deal of honest toil. McKenna exhibited with the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and widely throughout Europe and the US. His work is included in numerous collections, public and private, in Ire- land and internationally. Aidan Dunne. August 2024