OISÍN BYRNE

Early Years

Oisín Byrne was born in Dublin in 1983. His mother was a teacher and his father was an architect, and he recalls them encouraging his creativity, saying in a 2026 interview that they “never batted an eyelid at us taking over the dining room to make a play, a big theatre backdrop or to cover the wall in drawings”. He went to school at Gonzaga College in Dublin, where he would skip PE and go to the art room instead. Byrne studied at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), where he revelled in the school’s late hours. After graduation, he worked as a full-time artist in Dublin before moving to London to do his MA at Goldsmiths.

Oisín Byrne: Artworks

Byrne’s artistic practice begins with drawing; he considers paintings to be a form of drawing. Using vibrant colours and textural experiments, he creates a dialogue with his viewers, making work that discusses the relationship between the self and the wider world. Byrne also produces video and writings, and has collaborated with filmmakers, fashion designers and an astrophysicist.

• Byrne’s 2024 exhibition Smell the Book took place in Mount Stuart, a neo-Gothic mansion on the Isle of Bute. The starting point for the show was the Mount Stuart archive of Irish and Gaelic books, augmented by Byrne’s personal library, and the exhibition considered how language, literature and form co-exist. Byrne produced six oil paintings for the show, Glossia (2024), as well as a moving-image piece A Paixão (2022), in which Byrne, in a bath, meets Clarice Lispector. He also included a video work of three of his songs performed by a quartet.
• The 2025 exhibition Not Marble was portrait-centred, but the artworks weren’t traditional portraits. Each sitter was someone Byrne knew and enjoyed spending time with, so the pictures became all about the exchange between artist and subject. Six of the sitters also contributed essays to a book accompanying the show.
• Flowers are a key element of Byrne’s more recent work (notably 2026’s Cut Flowers exhibition). During lockdown, he began painting vases of flowers that were almost on the turn. The big, joyful nature of the paintings has been reproduced as screenprints, in bright reds, oranges, yellows and rich browns. Speaking in 2026, Byrne said: “The bunch is moving and changing over the days it takes to make the work, opening or wilting, an accretion of moments, like a long exposure photo. They are paintings of flowers but, perhaps, they’re also paintings of time.”

Oisín Byrne: Select Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Cut Flowers, Connolly, London (2026) (and touring)
• Oisín Byrne: Not Marble, Amanda Wilkinson, London (2025)
• Oisín Byrne: Smell the Book, Mount Stuart (2024)
• Oisín Byrne: Act Natural, Amanda Wilkinson, London (2022)

Select Group Exhibitions

• Letter Like Shapes, Word Like Sequences, Amanda Wilkinson, London (2023)
• Desire: A Revision From the 20th Century to the Digital Age, IMMA, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019)
• Oisín Byrne featuring Gary Farrelly: Glue, Goldsmiths CCA, London (2018)
• A Hard Place, Laura Mars Gallery, Berlin (2017)
• 2017 Drawing Biennial at The Drawing Room, London (2017)
• The Wild, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2016)

Further Reading

• Oisín Byrne’s Instagram
• 2026 interview in The Irish Independent
• Interview from 2022 in The Gloss

Oisín Byrne FAQs

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