Edward Delaney RHA (1930-2009) Cathedral Bronze, 90cm high...

Hammer

€24,000

Edward Delaney RHA (1930-2009) Cathedral Bronze, 90cm high (35½'') Unique, circa 1961 Cathedral is a major work of sculpture by Edward Delaney RHA (1930-2009) who is considered one of Ireland’s most important 20th century sculptors. Delaney’s best known works include the 1967 statue of Wolfe Tone and the Famine Family memorial in St Stephen’s Green in Dublin and the statue of Thomas Davis and angels fountain in College Green, opposite Trinity College Dublin. These are all examples of lost-wax bronze castings, his main technique during the 1960s and early 1970s. Cathedral is in a similar vein and emulates the monumental form of these sculptures. Influenced by Celtic art and by European modernism, Delaney’s work is in many public and private collections. He was born in County Mayo and studied at the National College of Art and Design, after which he studied bronze casting and sculpture in Germany. He later received many foreign scholarships and would represent Ireland at foreign exhibitions such as the international Biennales in Paris, Tokyo and Buenos Aires. Delaney gained a reputation not only through Dublin galleries such as Hendriks, the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Solomon, but through showing work internationally. He is also known for his small figurative bronze work, stainless steel sculptures and his drawings and paintings on paper. His work is in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), the Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, OPW, AIB, Bank of Ireland, the Central Bank, the Arts Council of Ireland and the Ulster Museum among others. Cathedral is characteristic of Delaney’s monumental, zoomorphic style and is expressly abstract as well as ‘rock-form’ naturalistic. He developed this dramatic style in tandem with his interest in the standing human and animal form. The sculpture, which has been newly patinated and mounted, is of hollow bronze but heavy, and about four feet high and two feet wide. Large scale works by Delaney rarely come up for sale and they are all unique. There are no editions. The image here shows Cathedral from an RTE still of 1962, with the poet Patrick Kavanagh sitting in front of it. Kavanagh was a friend of the sculptor. In 2009, his son Eamon Delaney published a book about his father and the Irish arts scene of the 1960s and 1970s, entitled Breaking the Mould - A Story of Art and Ireland (2009). In the book, he describes this image as a great moment in Irish modernism -: Irish television, then in its infancy, the modern sculpture and the ‘pastoral to modernist’ poet. He describes how, in the image - which has gone around the world as part of the famous, Writers of Ireland poster - Kavanagh actually resembles the featured sculpture. ‘Kavanagh’s pose is particularly satisfying because Cathedral is such an abstract piece’ Delaney writes. ‘Whatever about the public work, this really is modern, like a section of moon rock with a niche in its side or a gouged out tree trunk. Uncannily, the whole piece resembles the poet himself: solid, grounded and both traditional and modern, recognisable and abstract. He even shares the special quality of Eddie’s work: brute weight rendered tenderly.’