Home and high ground: Conor Foy

The Molesworth Gallery is delighted to present Home and high ground, an exhibition of new work by Conor Foy, running from July 6th - 27th. Like the work, the title of the show is oblique. ‘Home’ has a possessive subtext: where you identify as home is considered a safe place, a place of identity, a place to defend or a place to reclaim - a place that other people covet. Likewise, the ‘high ground’ of the title is neither a moral position nor a place of military advantage, but rather an exploration of the complex co-dependency those two meanings can engender.
Ambiguity has always been at the heart of Foy’s work. “Like all really good art, Conor Foy’s work is hard to pigeon-hole as being one thing, or as addressing one issue. Rather it addresses the question of being in a fascinating, multifaceted way.” So said Tyler Green, a columnist with Modern Painters, of Foy's work.
Writing in The Huffington Post, Colin Darke said of Foy that he "is an important artist, he is in the arena creating great work.... he shows that he is able to capture immense emotion through delicate figurative work. He creates a quiet narrative that does not lecture the viewer, but it compels the viewer to consider the figure's tragic story”. 
Born in Dublin in 1967, Foy graduated with a BFA from NCAD in 1990 and an MFA from Columbia University in 1997. He has had two previous solo exhibitions at the Molesworth and has shown in multiple years at the RHA, where he was awarded the Fergus O’Ryan Memorial Award in 2007. He is one of a group of notable Irish artists, alongside Corban Walker and Norman Mooney, who have taken up residence in New York - where Luc Tuymans is an occasional visitor to his studio.