"There are two landscapes, one outside the self and another within.
Landscape is subject to how we perceive it, as well as our response, and how it in turn influences us.
- John Ruskin, Art Critic (1819-1900).
Landscape is subject to how we perceive it, as well as our response, and how it in turn influences us.
- John Ruskin, Art Critic (1819-1900).
Emerging artist Kaye Maahs is a native of Kerry who has been living and working in the Burren, County Clare since 2003. Maahs' was awarded a BA in Fine Art from CCAM GMIT, Galway in 2015. In 2018 she was an invited artist by the Royal Hibernian Academy Members for their Annual Exhibition. More recently Kaye was awarded the Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust Award enabling her to travel to Iceland for research in September 2019. Her painting 'White Grandeur' was shortlisted for the 251st Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2019 in London. In March 2019 at the she was Curators Choice at the Hunt Museum, Limerick. Kaye has also been the recipient of Clare County Council's Tyrone Guthrie Artist Bursary Award in 2017 and awarded a two week residency at the Heinrich Böll Cottage Residency on Achill Island, Mayo which she undertook in Autumn 2019. Maahs' was also awarded a residency in 2019 with The Cill Rialaig Project Residency that she will take up in spring 2021.
Recent shows include RHA Annual Exhibition 2019, Cairde Visual 2019, September Group Show, Claremorris Gallery Mayo, Cairde Visual Sligo 2018, Hermione 2018 (Curated by Aisling Prior), VUE Art Fair at the RHA with Claremorris Gallery, Kerry Visual Artist Showcase 2017, COE 2017 Mayo, Boyle Arts Festival, and the 9 Walls 2017 exhibition at the Hyde Bridge Gallery in Sligo.
Maahs’ work is rooted in both the local and the personal. Her practice is defined by daily observations and musings. It is the residue of these moments that informs her paintings. Maahs' paintings are never made directly from life, instead they evolve naturally in the quiet moments within the solitude of her studio space. Here the act of recall plays a vital part in her process in enabling her to instil into her paintings the immediacy of experience that she encounters when out in the land. In a sense it is the emotional that dictates the visual within her work and her aim is to convey this through the language of paint.
Recent shows include RHA Annual Exhibition 2019, Cairde Visual 2019, September Group Show, Claremorris Gallery Mayo, Cairde Visual Sligo 2018, Hermione 2018 (Curated by Aisling Prior), VUE Art Fair at the RHA with Claremorris Gallery, Kerry Visual Artist Showcase 2017, COE 2017 Mayo, Boyle Arts Festival, and the 9 Walls 2017 exhibition at the Hyde Bridge Gallery in Sligo.
Maahs’ work is rooted in both the local and the personal. Her practice is defined by daily observations and musings. It is the residue of these moments that informs her paintings. Maahs' paintings are never made directly from life, instead they evolve naturally in the quiet moments within the solitude of her studio space. Here the act of recall plays a vital part in her process in enabling her to instil into her paintings the immediacy of experience that she encounters when out in the land. In a sense it is the emotional that dictates the visual within her work and her aim is to convey this through the language of paint.
'Kaye Maahs’s own paintings more closely recall the Romanticism of Casper David Friedrich. Her stark expanses of woodland, water and mountains are often shrouded in mist and there is a reflective, melancholy note to them, their mood enhanced by her spare, judicious palette, evoking both the landscape and an inner world.'
Aidan Dunne
Irish Times Art Critic
'Maahs draws from the lexicon of Irish painting but her visual language is confident and does not mimic, nor is she overburdened by prevailing notions of "Irish Painting" : the artist's voice is authentic and her technique masterful. Her subject matter is ordinary; the landscape which surrounds her, but her engagement with it is fresh, true and beautiful.'
Rosemarie Noone
Claremorris Gallery Director
'Kaye’s work is rich with paint, yet economical. She doesn’t flatter the viewer with the importance of your gaze. You are small in her landscape, yet utterly privileged to be there…. There is a play here with forms and mass, with an unnerving light and a tender palette. And there is a story told, once again with the landscape as the hero and we—as observers—are only incidental.’
Sara Foust, Artist
http://www.mayonews.ie/living/32771-landscape-reclaimed
'The good painting continued in the galleries on Mount Street. First up were the flooded landscapes of Kaye Maahs. I loved the atmospheric simplicity of these works that captured an eerie stillness after the trauma of a recent deluge.'
Eamon Maxwell
Curator
