Obituaries

Michael O’Sullivan obituary: Postmodernist artist with vision

Mixed mysticism and realism across a range of media which included sculpture, conceptual art and painting

Artist Michael O'Sullivan
Fri Jun 03 2022 - 05:00

Born: November 19th, 1945

Died: April 15th, 2022

Michael O’Sullivan, who has died aged 76, was a trailblazer before most if not all others in the Irish visual art scene realised there was a trail to be blazed, specifically a postmodernist vision which eschewed tradition, including modernist tradition, in favour of a distinctly individual mix of mysticism and realism, across a range of media, which included sculpture, conceptual art and painting.

Writing of O’Sullivan’s work in 1988, the painter Robert Ballagh, explained his significance in trenchant terms: “O’Sullivan [is] an artist with a truly original vision…he is impossible to pigeonhole…I find Michael O’Sullivan’s rigorously intellectual approach…an exciting and refreshing experience.”

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Ballagh attributed this to O’Sullivan’s willing acceptance of literary influences in his work, in contrast to mere spontaneity or intuition; he “created a fascinating body of work which linked favourite writers like Swift with ancient mythologies”. Thus, Ballagh compared O’Sullivan to Flann O’Brien’s (Brian O’Nolan’s) approach in At Swim Two Birds where “past and present, myth and legend, high art and popular culture all collide in a deliciously rich cultural mix”.

A very strong example of this was an early high point of his career, a work of conceptual sculpture exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London as part of the Sense of Ireland Festival in the Spring of 1980. There, in works collectively entitled Without the Walls, curated by Dorothy Walker, his installation on the theme of the Celtic horse-goddess Epona attracted a stunning response from the art critic of the Observer newspaper, Michael Feaver, who wrote that “for complexity, versatility, stage-management and sheer readability, Michael O’Sullivan takes the Sense of Ireland gilded shamrock”.

The exhibit, including a jump from a show jumping arena surrounded by paintings relating the Epona myth to modern events, was a reflection on that ever-present reality of Irish life, the horse, including references to Swift’s Houyunyms from Gulliver’s Travels, superior sensitive beings with which he may, consciously or otherwise, have identified.

O’Sullivan’s paintings were equally eclectic, combing images from mythology with representations of urban streetscapes and seascapes in a unique style. A good example, now in the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), St Brendan Discovers the Crystal Pillar, proved especially popular with the public: a postcard depicting it has been one of the biggest-selling of all such postcards at IMMA’s gift shop.

O’Sullivan had come to attention in the mid-1960s while still a student at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), which he attended from 1963 until graduation in 1968. While there, he worked with the well-known bronze foundry artist Werner Schurmann, assisted in the casting of the Children of Lir monument for the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin, and was awarded a Higgins Travelling Scholarship to Amsterdam and Athens. He took first prize at the 1916 Commemorative Exhibition in 1966, and, after graduating, received successively three bursary awards from the Arts Council. His work was shown regularly from 1966 onwards at the Oireachtas and the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, and in solo shows at the David Hendriks Gallery and the Project Arts Centre. Appointed a lecturer in the sculpture department of NCAD in 1972, he taught there until retirement in 2007.

An early admirer and patron was Helen Hooker-O’Malley, widow of the patriot and writer Ernie O’Malley, who encouraged him to study abroad according to O’Sullivan’s partner for 25 years from the mid-1970s, Dorothy Macgabhann.

O’Sullivan’s work attracted international attention, particularly after 2000, with inclusion in group shows in the US (the Re-imagining Ireland Exhibition at the University of Virginia, 2003), in Australia in 2005, at the Berlin Film Festival in 2006, in Copenhagen in 2009, and at a James Joyce-themed exhibition, Re-Joyce, in Oslo the following year. The latter show of mixed media work and a bronze, was to be O’Sullivan’s last major outing. Thereafter, as his widow Miriam Sweeney puts it “the faith seemed to have gone out of him”, and he made only small pieces for friends and family.

Ironically, though, this later period was to be a particularly happy time personally for O’Sullivan, whom Sweeney had met around 2002; the two married in 2015, after spending two years living on Valentia Island, which he found both restful and inspiring. O’Sullivan loved southwest Munster, and his remarkable glassfibre and resin representation of an anchor, with the stem surmounted by the image of a court jester, and the hooks representing a sea goddess, now forms part of the West Cork Sculpture Trail and can be seen on display above the foreshore walk at Schull.

Despite his success, some critics found O’Sullivan’s distinctiveness challenging. As Sweeney puts it “Michael’s work wasn’t easy to write about and I think that worked against him”. Notably, perhaps, he was never elected to the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), despite having exhibited there regularly as part of group shows.

Michael O’Sullivan grew up in Co Dublin, one of four children of Tom O’Sullivan, a civil servant who was keeper of records in the Land Commission, and Jetta, nee Carroll, a homemaker. The family lived in Dún Laoghaire and later Booterstown, and he was educated, before NCAD, at the Christian Brothers’ College, Monkstown.

O’Sullivan is survived by Miriam and his stepchildren, Hamlet, Ruth, Naomi and Matthew Sweeney, and by his sister Alice Rapple and his brother David. He was predeceased by his brother Barry.