Robert Ballagh

Robert Ballagh (born 22 September 1943) is an Irish artist. He was born in Dublin and graduated from the Dublin Institute of Technology. He is both a painter and designer. His painting style was strongly influenced by pop art and his paintings are often playful and didactic. He is a member of Aosdána.

He began with an apprenticeship to the painter Michael Farrell and taught himself the rest. Ballagh made his first big splash with the "People Looking At" paintings, not least because his reproductions of Pollock, Lichtenstein, Rothko etc, were so convincingcite web | title=Art: Robert Ballagh | work=Times Online (15 October 2006) | url=http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/article598963.ece | accessdate=2008-07-11] Ballagh represented Ireland at the 1969 Biennale de Paris. In 1972, he splashed animal blood on the floor of the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, for an installation about Bloody Sunday. He readily admits that his early output was limited by lack of aesthetic training. For instance, the reason his "Portrait of Gordon Lambert", features a silk-screened face is simply that he was not very good at painting faces back in 1972.

Among the theatre sets he has designed are sets for "Riverdance", Samuel Beckett's "Endgame" (1991) and Oscar Wilde's "Salomé" (1998). He has also designed over 70 Irish postage stamps and the last series of Irish banknotes, "Series C", before the introduction of the euro. [cite web | title=Robert Ballagh, Set Designer | work=Riverdance | url=http://www.riverdance.com/htm/theshow/thejourney/robert_ballagh.htm | accessdate=2008-07-11] He has also painted polemical murals in west Belfast.

In 1991, he co-ordinated the 75th anniversary commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising. Interviewed for a special feature that was published in The Irish Times on the 90th anniversary, he related that this had caused him to be harassed by the Special Branch of the Garda Siochána. He is the President of the Irish Institute, which promotes international republicanism.

The Royal Hibernian Academy’s Gallagher gallery, marked his career with a full-scale retrospective in 2006. He was the creative force behind the opening ceremonies for the 2003 Special Olympics World Summer Games and the 2006 Ryder Cup, both held in Ireland. In 2006, The Gorry Gallery in Dublin had a major show of his work entitled: Robert Ballagh, Works from the Studio, 1959-2006. [cite web | title=Robert Ballagh, Works from the Studio, 1959-2006 | work=Gorry Gallery Catalogue | url=http://www.gorrygallery.ie/catalogs/Ballagh.pdf | accessdate=2008-07-11]

Work in Collections

*National Gallery of Ireland
*Ulster Museum
*Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery
*Albrecht Dürer House, Nuremberg
*Trinity College, Dublin

References

Persondata
NAME= Ballagh, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION=Irish artist
DATE OF BIRTH=22 September 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH=Dublin, Ireland
DATE OF DEATH=
PLACE OF DEATH=