The painter Micheal Farrell died yesterday at his home in Cardet in southern France. Widely liked and respected in the arts community, he was one of the best-known Irish artists of his generation.
In the late 1960s and 1970s he was one of a group of younger artists who transformed the face of Irish art, opening it up to international developments but also, paradoxically, encouraging it to discover its own independent voice.
Though he moved to France in 1971, his artistic life still centred on Ireland and he maintained an exile's attachment, fiercely critical and deeply affectionate, to his homeland.
Born in Kells, Co Meath, in 1940, in his teens he attended Ampleforth public school in England, an unhappy experience which, he says, first impressed on him his Irish identity. He went on to study at St Martin's College of Art in London.
He established his reputation with paintings that married the techniques of pop and abstract art to Celtic motifs, describing himself in retrospect as "a hard-edge Celtic painter".
In 1966 he employed Robert Ballagh to work as his assistant on a mural commission.
By the end of the 1960s he was one of the most cosmopolitan and successful Irish artists, representing Ireland at the Paris Biennale in 1967 and winning various awards.
He was highly regarded as a draughtsman, painter and printmaker yet, despite increasing commercial success and critical acclaim, he decided to settle in Paris.
Dismay at unfolding events in Northern Ireland prompted him to move from abstract to representational art: Presse Politique featured newspaper reports of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in 1974, Madonna Irlanda, painted in 1977, depicted Mother Ireland as a scandalous courtesan. He loved to provoke and in 1994 generated a flurry of controversy with his sculpture of an unnamed bishop depicted in a compromising pose with a woman.
In 1989 he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat and during his long battle with the disease endured an intermittent series of gruelling treatments.
A regular exhibitor with the Taylor Gallery in Dublin, his work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Ulster Museum in Belfast, the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the National University of Australia.
