Seán Shanahan: Air Choir
San Diego, California — Madison Gallery presents Seán Shanahan’s “Air Choir”, the Irish Artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States. Shanahan’s use of colour and MDF wood lend his paintings a quality that feels simultaneously airy and dense, exploring luminosity, translucency, and contour. More akin to installations than traditional one-dimensional paintings, the pieces take a poetic form open to interpretation and introspection.
“Air Choir” will exhibit twelve works creating a dialogue between the paintings Seán considers skeletal and works with fuller surfaces, exploring emptiness and fullness. The paintings imbue an anodyne quality equally healing and ruminative, inviting the viewer to question positive and negative space. If one were to cut these pieces open, they would find layers of pigment that deepen as one voyages further. Perhaps this is also true of the universal sentient experience. The works possess a candid opulence and vitality that awaken in whichever room, building, or structure they inhabit.
“The air in front of painting is altered, like the air above mountains, it sings,” says the Artist, who currently resides in Olgiate Molgora, a small town between Milan and Como in Italy.
The title of the exhibition is an homage to music, which resonates more with Shanahan than the overly contrived fine art lexicon. Similarly, the experience of viewing these immersive pieces offers solace, as listening to Ludovico Einaudi’s “Seven Days Walking” or the sound of a cool breeze rippling over the ocean’s surface. The mind feels capacious when viewing these paintings, which seem to transform and take on new meaning the more one spends time with them.
The corporeal nature of Shanahan’s oeuvre comes from decades of research, where the artist has studied deeply the etymology of light, refraction, absorption, and form to convey his interpretation and experience of life. The result is a kind of salvation.
“Shanahan’s painting refers solely to the here and now of the perceptual moment, and if there is evidence of the temporality of its creation (evident through close observation of the surface), there is no transcendental dimension, but rather a sort of secularization of monochrome poetics.”
—Giorgio Verzotti for Artforum
Sean Shanahan (born John William Shanahan) was born in Dublin the 17th of May 1960. Shanahan is a visual artist whose practice resides primarily in painting. He has spent his childhood growing up in Britain receiving an English education. His academic career took shape at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in Chelsea and the Croydon College of Art and Design where he pursued fine art and history of art studies. At the age of twenty-two years old, in 1983, he moved to Milan where he held his first solo show in the Luigi De Ambrogi gallery. In 1986, he was awarded a scholarship for the Fundación Olivar de Castillejo in Madrid, where he stayed until 1990. In 1997, Shanahan moved to Montevecchia where he set up a studio and further developed his techniques in the extension of oil colours in homogenous layers through the use of window squeegee (window cleaning instruments) defined by tapering that restores three-dimensionality. The artistic direction taken by Shanahan has encountered the interest of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, who began to collect Shanahan’s works in a systematic strategy. Shanahan’s works collected in the Panza Collection have been exhibited through the years at important collective shows such as the Panza collection exhibition “State of Mind” held in 2010 at the Lucca Center of Contemporary Art, at the Panza collection exhibition held in 2015 “Perception of the Future”, and at the Panza Collection exhibition at the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia. Furthermore, in Villa Panza in Varese Sean Shanahan has now been placed, in a room at the first floor, as a permanent installment. In addition to his ongoing practices, Shanahan through the years has been invited in academies around the globe to hold several lectures, however since 2019, has become a professor for the Visual Art Department at Nuovo Accademia di Belle Arti.
Madison Gallery was founded by Lorna York in 2001. The program focuses on internationally recognized, museum-level artists whose work contributes to domestic and international cultural dialogue. The gallery presents significant Latin artists and brings international artists to San Diego for the first time. The core gallery program focuses on young and emerging artists, but the gallery also punctuates the program with historical exhibitions to provide depth and context. Artists represented by Madison Gallery receive critical attention and are widely exhibited. Many of the gallery’s primary artists, originally shown with Madison Gallery, are now being shown internationally and by established galleries in other cities, proving that the gallery has become a springboard for young talent.
