Shapes and shadows

In many pictures Harriet Kirkwood seems to be telling a story, and the story is life itself, which infuses her painting, writes Hilary Pyle


Shapes and shadows
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Harriet Kirkwood is unusual among Irish Modernists of her time because her ambition was to be thoroughly international. However, she made her career by associating closely with artists who had strong national intentions, and whose aim was to build a strong modern art movement for Ireland. Harrie, as her friends called her (she also used this name when showing for the first time with the Society of Dublin Painters in 1922), had had work accepted by the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and would exhibit there again, but she always thought of herself as more closely aligned to the Modernist Dublin Painters.

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