Visual Arts
Barbara Warren
Born in Dublin in 1925, Barbara Warren studied at the National College of Art & Design, Regent Street Polytechnic in London, and André L’Hote in Paris. She later lectured at NCAD from 1973 to 1984.
Solo exhibitions include the Dublin Painters’ Gallery (1954, 55); Dawson Gallery, Dublin (1957, 61, 72); Taylor Galleries, Dublin (1982, 86, 92); and United Arts Club (1991). In December 2002 and January 2003, the Royal Hibernian Academy’s Gallagher Gallery held a retrospective exhibition of her work, and the Taylor Galleries showed work from Ireland and Spain, which centres on landscapes and still lifes. Recent work includes various paintings that evolved from sketch book studies
Group exhibitions include the Royal Hibernian Academy Annual and Christmas exhibitions 1950 – 2005; Irish Exhibition of Living Art 1953–1967; Oireachtas 1960–early 1970s; Irish Contemporary Art in Germany – 7 artists 1955; Irish Painting, Hugh Lane Gallery, 1963. Irish Women Artists – 18th century to the present day; National Gallery of Ireland, 1987; The Irish Figurists and Figurative Painting in Irish Art Dublin/ London, 1990; Boyle Arts Festival; Art of the State of New Direction, OPW, 1970 – 1985 and 1998; Florence Biennale, Italy, 1999.
Her paintings are held in the collections of the Ulster Museum, the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Office of Public Works in Dublin, the National Self-Portrait Collection at the University of Limerick, and the Haverty Trust. Group shows include: Irish Contemporary Art in Germany (1955), Irish and Dutch Painters, Hugh Lane Gallery (1963) and Irish Woman Artists Eighteenth Century to the Present Day, National Gallery of Ireland (1987).
She won a Purser-Griffith travel scholarship in the history of European painting in 1955, the James Kennedy Memorial Award for portraiture from the RHA in 1990, and a career achievement prize at the Florence Biennale in 1999.
Aosdána mourns the death of Barbara Warren
With the death at the age of 92 of our colleague Barbara Warren, Aosdána and Ireland have lost perhaps the last remaining link between the painters of today and those of the great French tradition of the 19th century. Like Mainie Jellet and Evie Hone, Barbara was a student of André Lhote in Paris and, through him, she was deeply influenced by Gauguin and Cézanne and by Cubist masters like Braque. She had also studied with Charles Lamb in Connemara and the landscape of the west remained a constant inspiration to her. Barbara was a painter’s painter, the sort of artist whose work was, and is, appreciated and admired by her peers for the individuality with which she approached the perennial subjects of the handling of pigments and the disposition of forms. As a personality she was quiet, modest, retiring, gentle, altogether delightful. We will miss her greatly.
15 May 2017
