Irish Artist Releases Controversial Works From His Private Collection Exclusively For Art Chicago

Online, April 27, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Sean Hillen is known for his powerful series of small-dimensional photomontages in which he reconstructs elements of political, religious, social and economic periods and events from Ireland's history to present witty assemblages of contradictions. Art Chicago represents the first time the collection will be showcased in the United States, along with a personal appearance by the artist. Due to the controversial nature of Hillen's imagery, which depicts his own photography taken during a time of conflict and chaos, his work was censored in the UK and Ireland for many years. Interestingly, the Imperial War Museum in London recently endorsed Hillen by selecting 24 pieces for their permanent collection. Nobel Prize winning author Seamus Heaney has referred to Hillen's art as expressing "an ache for some kind of 'wholeness', in a world where the comfort of wholeness, and simple wholeness is denied."

Hillen was born in 1961 in Newry, County Down, Northern Ireland. He was eight when the troubles erupted in 1968-69 and grew up witnessing the turmoil of that period. His 'Troubles' 1983-1993 series piece together imagery such as the Virgin Mary appearing above a British Army patrol, watchtowers in Piccadilly Circus, masked militants of the Irish National Liberation Army parading alongside the Queen's mounted guard and London buses in Newry. Responding to the process and concept of these works Soko Phay-Vakalis, art critic and associate professor at the department of fine arts of Paris 8 University, has noted that Hillen "transcends and subverts the traditional tool of propaganda in order better to reveal the complexity of history, which cannot be understood in any Manichean manner. His plays on meaning, half-subversive, half-surreal, display in the end the fragility of the human condition faced with the traumas of history." Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times assistant editor and author, has written: "Hillen has visualized contradictions by splicing together the mythic and the mundane, hilarity and horror, the local and the global, vitality and violence. What his work most emphatically is not is reverential or solemn." Hillen's work has been exhibited internationally and is held in major public international collections.

Additionally, BlueLeaf Gallery will be exhibiting works by Marty Kelly and Tom Climent. These Irish artists recently participated in a major international exhibition of work by Irish and New York artists presented by BlueLeaf Unlimited in Dublin.

Marty Kelly's new body of work addresses the impact on the human spirit of those living in regions of conflict, chaos and uncertainty. His paintings exemplify the spiritual strengths of people he encountered during his most recent travels to the Middle East through illuminated portrayals on a magnified scale. Evolving from small intimate formats, Kelly has turned to over-sized canvases to project his portraits of vaporous faces that emerge from dark voids. These portraits are not intended to be vestiges of chaos rather they reflect the essence of the human spirit that remains intact despite dire circumstances. Marty Kelly was born in 1979 in Carndonagh, County Donegal, and studied at Ulster University, Belfast. Since 2009 he has worked from his studio in Barcelona. Kelly's work is exhibited in London, Ireland and Barcelona.