DUBLIN.- IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) is presenting Revenants, a solo exhibition by Irish artist Kevin Mooney. Featuring a cross-section of key works made between 2016 and 2022, Revenants reflects Mooney's ongoing commitment to creating a 'speculative art history', one which imagines the 'lost' art of an Irish diaspora.

As a colonised nation, there are large gaps in the record of our art history caused by poverty, famine and mass migration. Revenants marks the gaps in our visual culture as a traumatic break and a reverberant event in the Irish psyche. Through a distinctive approach to figuration that draws on sources as varied as Vincent Van Gogh, Irish mythology and 1980s horror films, Mooney's work reconsiders these gaps and reverse-engineers the lost art of this Irish diaspora, imagining it as a mutant absurdist folklore, and, in the process opening up questions about cultural influence and transformation.

Hybridising imagery and visual languages from disparate traditions of painting and material culture, Mooney's work punctures some of the clichés of an Irish vernacular aesthetic, and opens up a space to reflect critically on the highly selective nature of popular history. By imaging the spectres of this 'lost' Irish art, Revenants reminds us that ghost stories are as revealing as they are disturbing, in that they point to the complexities of our culture, past and present.

Kevin Mooney is a Cork-based artist who graduated from the MFA program in NCAD in 2012, and from the MTU Crawford College of Art and Design in 1997. The exhibition is curated by Sarah Kelleher, arts writer and Government of Ireland scholar. The exhibition at IMMA is the culmination of a major series of exhibitions in which Mooney explores the 'what might have been' in Irish art history and visual culture.