Conor Kelly (born Cork, Ireland 1980) is an Irish artist currently living and working in Glasgow. He graduated from BA Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Ulster in Belfast in 2002 and completed an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2008. Recent exhibitions include 'Turn It On Again', SWG3 Projects as part of Glasgow International 2010; 'Open West 2010', Summerfield Gallery, Cheltenham, 2010; 'The Revolutionary Haircut', Glasgow Project Room, 2009(solo); 'Posthumous Hummus', A.Vermin, Glasgow, 2009; 'Arts Council of Northern Ireland - Recent Acquisitions', The Braid Mid-Antrim Museum, Ballymena NI, 2009 and 'And So It Goes', Artnews Projects, Berlin.
In 2009 he was artist-in-residence at Curfew Tower, Cushendall NI in association with Void Gallery, Derry and was the recipient a Culture & Sport Glasgow Visual Arts Grant.
'My practice primarily consists of painting. One of the central concerns within my work is the art object�s operation as historical device. My work draws on the grandeur and hangover of history painting to create fictions both romantic and absurd.
My work often engages with the historicisation of modernism and the inherited roles of painting within that process. Employing techniques such as automatism serves to challenge and interrupt the authority of painting. Owning up to a corruption through image after image of half-truths, my work attempts to recount histories in the hope of unraveling and reassembling certain dominant representational systems.
A greater part of my studio processes and research involve fuelling the rupture of narrative and the introduction of deliberately insufficient proxies. The proxy forms and registers within my work attempt to operate within a constructed landscape-cum-over-boiled virtual reality to stage their own history simulation.
As part of the attempted revision of the modernist history of painting my work employs anachronistic modes to navigate the proscenium arch where the viewer and the subject become complicit in a dubious exchange.'
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