Seán McSweeney was born in Dublin in 1935. Self-taught as a painter, he lived in Wicklow for many years before moving to the west coast of Sligo in the 1980s, surrounding himself with the landscape that has been the leitmotif of his work ever since. Seán McSweeney’s work is rooted in the tradition of Irish landscape painting that stretches back to the 1800s. He returns frequently to the same subjects and is constantly drawn to the small bog pools and flat shoreline close to his home, painting them in different lights and in different seasons. McSweeey’s paintings, drawings and prints verge on abstraction, with bog pools reduced to rectangular shapes bordered by intruding grasses and plants and the coastline represented by a definite horizontal lines unequivocally separating land, sea and sky.
Seán McSweeney was the recipient of the Douglas Hyde Gold Medal in 1989 numerous P.J. Carrolls Awards at various Irish Exhibition of Living Art exhibitions. He is an Honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy and a member of Aosdána since 1984. In 2007 a major retrospective of his work was organised by the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo which toured to Triskel Art Centre, Cork and the Solstice Art Centre, Navan. McSweeney has had recent solo exhibitions at the Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast; and John Martin, London. His work is included in the public collections of the Arts Council, Trinity College, Limerick City Gallery, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin, Ballinglen Arts Foundation and the Boyle Civic Collection.
Exhibitions with Taylor Galleries:2009 New Works
2004 Work on Paper
2002 Bogland and Shoreline Sligo
2000 Work on Paper
1998
1995 Recent Work
1994
1992
1991
1988
1986
1984
1982
1965 – 77 (Dawson Gallery)