A graduate of St Martin´s School of Art, London, Micheal Farrell emerges as one of the most interesting of the group of Irish artists, notably Pat Scott, Jonathan Wade and Evin Nolan, who engaged with Modernist art in the 1960s. His early abstract paintings and sculptures combined geometric and organic elements, and were in tune with the hard-edged abstraction then current internationally. One of the finest of these works was a large mural commissioned by the Bank of Ireland in 1967.

Like Robert Ballagh, Farrell found himself in hostile opposition to many social and political aspects of life in Ireland. Speaking at the opening of a Living Art exhibition in Cork in 1969, he declared his intention of never exhibiting in Northern Ireland until the political situation there had been resolved. His work moved away from purely formal concerns and towards figuration.

Although he emigrated to France in 1971, Farrell continued to exhibit regularly in Ireland, and in the years following he evolved a personal style in which figurative elements again reappear, often relating to his own particular status and condition, linked with that of his native country.*

His work has been shown worldwide, and is included in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin City Gallery – the Hugh Lane, Ulster Museum, City of Manchester Art Gallery, Centres Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Musée d´Art Moderne de Paris. He won numerous international prizes during his career, and was elected a member of Aosdána in 1987.

— PM

*Cyril Barrett, Micheal Farrell (Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 1979)