Diarmuid Delargy was born in Belfast, Co. Antrim, in 1958. From 1978 to 1981 he studied for a degree in Fine art at the College of Art and Design, Ulster Polytechnic, and in 1983 he completed his MA in Fine Art at the Slade School of Art in London. Known equally as a painter, sculptor and a printmaker, Delargy’s work shows a consistent interest in formal composition and the underlying geometry of his subjects. His ongoing Art and Extinction series features the recurring motif of sharks laid out on a wooden table as if ready for dissection and consumption by the artist’s eye. Their grimaces are rendered with the same loose, expressive strokes that characterise much of Delargy’s graphic work in etching and aquatint, most notably the Beckett Suite From an Abandoned Work, based on a text by Samuel Beckett with the author’s written approval.Diarmuid Delargy was elected to Aosdána in 1999 and to the Royal Society of Painter/Printmakers, London in 2005. He has been the recipient of several bursaries awarded by the Arts Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and has spent time working with the Artists Union Workshop in Berlin and the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Co. Mayo.
Delargy has exhibited widely in Ireland and Britain. His most recent exhibitions have been at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon; Belfast Print Workshop; Galway Arts Centre; Portora Royal School, Enniskillen; Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin; and the Fendereskey Gallery, Belfast. Dealrgy’s work is included in many private collections, as well as the public collections of Trinity College, the OPW, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Queen’s University Collection in Belfast, Arts Council England, the National Self Portrait Collection in Limerick, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and St. Luke’s Hospital, Dublin.
Exhibitions with Taylor Galleries:2009 Shark: From the ‘Art and Extinction’ Series
2005 Beckett Suite
2004 Urn Series
1994 New Paintings
1994 Prints and Paintings
1988