Tony O’Malley’s constructions possess an individualism that defies categorisation, writes Angela Griffith ahead of the Butler Gallery’s exhibition in August.
Without question it is Tony O’Malley’s paintings that are most familiar to Irish audiences, distinguished by their intense colour and their emphatic surfaces, created by idiosyncratic mark-making with brush or blade. However, O’Malley, from the 1960s and throughout the rest of his career, created a series of sculptural works which he referred to as constructions. Despite the fact that he regarded them as an integral part of his métier, few have been exhibited, either in his lifetime or since.
