Brian Bourke was born in Dublin in 1936. The Bourkes are an artistically gifted family, as illustrated by Brian’s brother, Fergus, who was a skilled photographer. A graduate of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and Saint Martin’s School of Art in London (now Central Saint Martins), Brian Bourke has seen his corpus evolve and adapt in instinctive and unique ways. Early landscapes and life-size nude self-portraits rapidly expanded into series donning observational reflexes, personal perspectives and fictional narratives. The artist’s style adapts to his subject. Indeed, whereas portraits are highly delicate and rely on the levity of their lines, landscapes are far more textured, visually heavier. This latter corpus is widely associated with and inspired by the Connemara region, where the artist resides and works.
This approach led to quasi-immediate recognition, with Bourke’s first solo show taking place as early as 1964 in Dublin. The following year, Bourke won the Arts Council portrait competition, and represented Ireland in both the Paris Biennale and the Lugano Exhibition of Graphics. Further accolades would soon follow: 1966 saw him win the Munster and Leinster Bank competition; in 1967 he won first prize in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art competition; in 1980, a selection of his works were included in the Delighted Eye, Hibernian landscape and the Cork ROSC exhibitions; in 1985, he was named Sunday Independent Artist of the Year; and in 1993, he received the O’Malley Award from the Irish-American Cultural Institute.
Exposure also came in the form of shows and exhibitions, among which one can single out his artist-in-residence session in 1991 at the Beckett Festival of the Gate Theatre in Dublin, with works concurrently shown at the Douglas Hyde Gallery. In 1988, a retrospective exhibition of his work entitled 25 Years was included as part of the Galway Arts Festival and was later mounted at the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, Dublin. In 2001, a large exhibition of his portraits of women, centred around portraits of his son’s adopted daughter, appeared at the Dyehouse Gallery in Waterford.
The commercial record for one of Bourke’s work was set in 2004, when his oil painting Those Girls, Those Girls, Those Lovely Seaside Girls (a diptych) was sold at DeVeres, Dublin, for EUR 26 000.
Bourke lives and works in Co. Galway.
