Charles Tyrrell was born in Trim, Co. Meath, Ireland in 1950. He studied painting at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, graduating in 1974. That same year, he showed work for the first time at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin. Later in his career, he taught art at the Dún Laoghaire School of Art from 1977 to 1981.
A trip to America in the 1980s marked a significant turning point in Tyrrell’s perspective on his own work, engendering lasting influences. Among his transatlantic referents, he names abstract expressionism but also representatives of colour field painting such as Kenneth Nolan and Morris Louis as well as Mark Rothko. Keeping an eye on the American continent, he cites minimalism (Sol Lewitt in particular) as foundational to his own practice: ‘Minimalism is my base line. Looking at Sol Lewitt, I appreciate its mathematical reductivism, but I always come forward from that.’ Contemporary art is not Tyrell’s only source of inspiration, as various ancient artworks, such as Greek sculptures and other Assyrian reliefs, also populate and stimulate his imaginary.
Material can also be an aesthetic starting point for Tyrell, as in the early 1980s when St Peter’s Church on Aungier Street in Dublin was being demolished and Tyrrell salvaged timber from the building to use as the base material he would cut, score, burn and sand for a series of three-dimensional paintings.
In 1984, Tyrrell, together with his family, left Dublin, where he had settled, for Allihies on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork. This environment would prove a fruitful for his creative drive and inform his signature abstraction with the dormant power of nature.
In the 21st century, manmade materials were introduced in his corpus, namely through the use of aluminium as a surface. The artist speaks of his intense metal working period (2013-2015) as such: ‘The core of these pieces is that I work with metal spatulas and lay on paint… It’s a very particular engagement with the paint. Laying it on, scraping it off. Laying on a lot and pulling back, and allowing the metal to come through. It’s a constant process of laying on and removing paint and, very often, just leaving these very little thin, residual lines. It was like drawing with paint in a very particular kind of way, using these metal spatulas.’
Tyrrell’s list of solo exhibitions of the 21st century reads as follows: Two Path’s, Taylor Galleries, Dublin (2016); Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre (2015); Taylor Galleries, Dublin (2014); Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast (2013); Taylor Galleries, Dublin (2012); Solstice Arts Centre, Navan (2011); Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (2011); Taylor Galleries, Dublin (2009); Taylor Galleries, Dublin (2007); John Gibbons – Charles Tyrrell, Taylor Galleries, Dublin (2005); Fenton Gallery, Cork (2005); Fenton Gallery, Cork (2003); Butler Gallery, Kilkenny (2002); Taylor Galleries, Dublin (2001); Ten Years, Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery, Dublin (2000).
In 2021, the artist was elected an associate member of the Royal Hibernian Academy.
Tyrrell lives and works in Allihies on the Beara Peninsula in Co. Cork
