2026 March 12 – April 11

In Two Minds: David Crone & Carolyn Mulholland

This two-person exhibition brings together two of Ireland’s best loved artists, sculptor Carolyn Mulholland and painter David Crone.

Born in County Armagh in 1944, Carolyn Mulholland studied at the Belfast College of Art and was elected a member of Aosdána in 1990. She is a member of both the Royal Ulster Academy and Royal Hibernian Academy. Mulholland has completed numerous major sculptural commissions for institutions across Ireland and her work forms part of many important public and private collections, including the Chester Beatty Library at Dublin Castle, OPW State Collection, Ulster Museum, Armagh County Museum, Royal Ulster Academy of Arts Diploma Collection and Queen’s University Belfast.

Earlier this year, her sculpture Man on Trestle (1986) was re-installed along the Grand Canal at Wilton Place in Dublin and now welcomes visitors at the Leeson Street Bridge end of the canal bank.

David Crone was born in Belfast in 1937 and went to Belfast College of Art in 1956 to study sculpture (his best-known surviving work in sculpture is his Horse and Rider (1960) which is in the collection of Queen’s University Belfast). Crone finished his studies in sculpture but soon turned to painting, a medium he has worked with ever since. Crone is a member of the RHA (Royal Hibernian Academy) and among the most highly regarded and influential painters working in Ireland. Landscape has long been his primary subject matter; having spent decades painting fractured images of Belfast City, his mastery as a colourist came to the fore when he moved to a rural setting in the mid-1990s.

Characterised by his incisive curiosity, Crone’s paintings are animated by visual tensions, rhythms and encounters that challenge the viewer. As poet Michael Longley remarked: “His watchful, edgy, ambiguous work suggests that everything – from wild flower to boulder, from graffito to stone cross – is provisional. David Crone’s wonderful paintings commemorate the interim.”