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12 must-see artworks at the RHA Annual Exhibition 2025
It is the largest and longest-running open-submission exhibition in Ireland, and the 195th RHA Annual features 422 pieces by academicians and artists old and new.
It will also be the final Annual for Patrick Murphy, who retires as director of the
Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts
at the end of 2025. He took up the role in 1998, since when the RHA has regained its relevance in the Irish art infrastructure, revamped its Ely Place headquarters, elected its first woman president, revised its charter and celebrated its 200th anniversary.
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The RHA Annual Exhibition itself is selected by a committee of artists. Their choices, this year from 4,565 submissions, are made anonymously, and are exhibited alongside pieces from RHA members, plus 11 invited artists. Despite not including performance or site-specific works, the RHA Annual is often said to offer a snapshot of the state of art-making today.
So with all that going on, where do you start? We pick 12 works on which to feast your eyes.
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Abigail O'Brien: Susanna and the Elders I & II
195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Susanna and the Elders I, by Abigail O'Brien. Photograph courtesy of the artist
195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Susanna and the Elders II, by Abigail O'Brien. Photograph courtesy of the artist
Coming from the Bible's Book of Daniel, the story of Susanna and the Elders has been a pervy staple in art history, as two fully clothed men stare lustfully at the semi-naked Susanna. Rubens had a go, but it took Artemisia Gentileschi to give a sense of how Susanna herself might have felt, when she painted it, in multiple versions, in the 1600s.
Abigail O'Brien's large-scale photographs show a female display mannequin perched on a chair in a junk or antique shop from a pair of angles. More or less naked ('she' is wearing a hat and necklace), the images show the ludicrous proportions that have been manufactured to characterise female 'beauty'.
While the setting may hopefully imply how outdated these standards are, the images also underline the continuing objectification of women, in commerce as well as in art.
O'Brien is the RHA's first woman president in its 200-plus-year history; her preface to the exhibition catalogue sets out the gender inequalities that women artists still face. Despite greater parity in representation in the Annual, their work is still consistently undervalued, including by the artists themselves. Institutional inequalities also persist in our public collections.
That said, we may be doing better than they are in Britain. O'Brien notes that the UK Royal Academy of Arts, in London, has been going for more than 250 years, yet only held its first solo show by a woman artist in its main galleries in 2024. As she writes: 'most of all, we need to keep talking about it.'
Caoimhe McGuckin: Wellspring
195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Wellspring, by Caoimhe McGuckin. Photograph courtesy of the artist
While The Fall, a large architectural pavilion by Ben Mullen, Peter Maybury and Tom de Paor, initially grabs the attention as it eats up a large chunk of the upper main gallery, there are some very powerful smaller sculptural gems to savour.
Áine Ryan's 'Go Make the Tea' He Said is a delicate pâte-de-verre trio of sculptures on a silver tray. What at first appear to be little biscuits are instead a pair of breasts. Serving up subversion with every sip?
Alongside this, Caoimhe McGuckin's Wellspring is a cast-wax model of the human heart. Instead of aorta there are stubs of bright red crayons. It may bring to mind an idea of human creativity beginning at childhood, but it's also worth realising that the sculpture very strongly resembles a grenade.
Elaine Byrne: Losing All Sense of Time
195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Losing All Sense of Time, by Elaine Byrne. Photograph courtesy of the artist
Elaine Byrne's sybaritic image of a swimming pool is photographed in vivid colour, as tanned families and loving couples disport themselves on fake rocks.
So far so very escapist. But the pool is built out over the sea, which threatens to engulf the bathers on one side. Suddenly the thin fencing seems ludicrously fragile – as ludicrous, perhaps, as building a swimming pool at the edge of the ocean.
While frequently beautiful, Byrne's work tends to have a political edge, so look closer still and see that the sea is a totally different hue of blue, and the real rocks edging into the picture are different again from their created cousins next door.
The idea of sunbathing at the end of the world calls to mind Sun & Sea, the opera performance that came to Cork Midsummer in 2023, after winning the Golden Lion for Lithuania at the Venice Biennale in 2019.
Bernadette Kiely: No Promised Land
195th RHA Annual Exhibition: No Promised Land, by Bernadette Kiely. Courtesy of the artist
A highly accomplished painter, Bernadette Kiely has been increasingly focusing her subtle eye on the
climate crisis
. Her arresting oil painting No Promised Land seems as if it is literally saturated, as a bright-red delivery truck is swamped in the midst of a flooded plain.
Conjuring all the nuances of greens and greys, and with a brilliant eye for composition, Kiely shows how easily our landscapes, and our sense of safety, can be obliterated by the power of natural forces.
We can just make out roads, hedges and the tops of trees, but if we don't do something soon, the future could become a highly inhospitable place – even in Ireland's gentle fields.
Ally Nolan: The Men/Na Fir
195th RHA Annual Exhibition: The Men/Na Fir, by Ally Nolan. Courtesy of the artist
You'll need to go to the passage behind the RHA's reception desk to find this large mixed-media panel. Based on Thomas H Mason's photograph Four Aran Men, Inis Meáin, from the
National Museum of Ireland
, the artist has layered digitally printed organza, linen, wool and appliqué, complete with hand-woven embroidery.
Nolan is an award-winning fashion graduate with a master's in art history, a background that tells in this richly complex work that brings the original black-and-white print to life. It shows the vibrancy of the layers of knowledge embedded in the legacies of craft, while underlining the craft embodied in some of today's technologies.
Ronnie Hughes: Chromatic II
195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Chromatic II, by Ronnie Hughes. Courtesy of the artist
There is a joyful exuberance at this year's Annual not seen since before the Covid pandemic. This is not to say that artists are ignoring the panoply of problems the world is facing, but there is nonetheless a burst of colour, in painting particularly. A cluster of canvases in one of the upper galleries includes Tom Climent's Contour Lines, John Fitzsimons's Generation and Ann Marie Webb's Back Light.
Chromatic II, by Ronnie Hughes, shows how the simple-seeming geometries of colour and line can make the eyes and mind dance. With none of the frenetic, brain-melting energies of full-on op-art, this work gets behind and beyond language to celebrate the power of colour in all its abstract glories.
Cathal Carolan: Censored
195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Censored, by Cathal Carolan. Courtesy of the artist
In the Annual hang, the RHA's atrium is reserved for highly wantable small works, and this year there are plenty to shine. Conor Horgan's photograph of pinked-up oyster mushrooms comes from his Disco Vegetables series, Stephanie Rowe's Auction II captures a moment of intensity in jewel-like form, while Tara O'Reilly's Night Worker is a standout of a small portrait.
Within this group Cathal Carolan's Censored continues to draw the eye. A headscarved woman is seated on a bus or train, looking away from the camera, her eye line bisected by a window panel. While this anonymising gesture is powerful in itself, what makes the work unforgettable is that this woman, out of context and perhaps even out of her home country, has all the qualities of posture and light of a Vermeer. Value and worth are curious notions, dependent entirely on the arbitrary whims of place and time.
Pauline Rowan: Awake, Between the Gates
195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Awake, Between the Gates, by Pauline Rowan. Courtesy of the artist
There's a vast novel of story in this photograph. A baby sleeps while what we presume is its mother lies awake. It could be a moment in any new parent's life, yet the pair are on a mattress on a floor, the rumpled sheet not quite tucked in. Quietly heartbreaking, the image catches at homelessness, dispossession, determination and love.
The work was actually made when Rowan moved with her newborn daughter to live in a house on grounds open to the public. When the work was shown at Photo Museum Ireland at the beginning of this year, the artist recalled that tourists would stand and look through the windows.
Adding biographical narrative to understanding a work of art can sometimes expand but often limits it. You don't need to know the backstory to find this an unforgettable image.
Agata Stoinska: Reverberations
195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Reverberations, by Agata Stoinska. Courtesy of the artist
Many artists have their eyes on nature in this year's Annual. Martin Gale imagines a return of wolves in a pair of paintings, while Tony G Murray's duo of Silent Forest prints leads you to imagine where myths of tree creatures may have come from.
In this vein, Agata Stoinska's large-scale forest photograph brings you right to the heart of the emergence of legend, with a clever doubling device that manages to avoid becoming glib. Instead the mirrored trees create a portal, and everything is calling you to want to walk through.
Rae Perry: Resolutions
195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Resolutions, by Rae Perry. Courtesy of the artist
The US-born, Dublin-based artist Rae Perry is largely self-taught, but her time in Florence, where she studied drawing, shows in her use of light and in the soft and rich Florence-school-inspired hues of her canvas.
Nicely enigmatic, Resolutions is also tender and intimate. Amid the portraits crowding the exhibition – from Robert Ballagh's La Républicaine, to Emma Stroude's trio in An Acorn or the Sky, to the Portrait of Tony Strickland by Neil Shawcross – Resolutions stands out, quietly.
Michael Wann: City Limits (Those Trees Will Have to Go)
195th RHA Annual Exhibition: City Limits (Those Trees Will Have to Go), by Michael Wann. Courtesy of the artist
Adding a hint of red to his more usual shades of charcoal grey, Michael Wann gets away from the delicacies of trees, rural byways and rustic ruins with another way of looking at nature.
Here the artist has collaged paper over canvas to lay out what looks like a much-folded cityscape – perhaps, in this imaginary world, looted from a planner's office somewhere, or salvaged from the chaos of some postapocalyptic future.
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Tower blocks reach for the leaden skies, while lower-rise civic buildings, and what might be edge-of-town sports or education complexes, come forward to meet the eye.
As the city creeps beyond its limits, an area of vegetation is marked for destruction, reminding us of the Australian writer Tim Winton's comment that 'architecture is what we console ourselves with once we've obliterated our natural landscapes'.
Vera Klute: Lustre II
195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Lustre II, by Vera Klute. Courtesy of the artist
Extraordinarily versatile, Vera Klute is a renowned portrait artist. Her oil painting Slope, also in the exhibition, is a lush jungle of a canvas delving into the infinite varieties of our often overlooked riverbanks. Before you get to that, however, you'll have met her Lustre II, a marvellous sculpture in the RHA foyer that, depending on your perspective, imagination and predilections, could be a strange alien craft, a giant fuchsia or something slightly sexual. And that's the glories of art in a nutshell.
The 195th RHA Annual Exhibition in association with McCann FitzGerald is at the
Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts
, in Dublin, until August 3rd
