Sean Lynch
Nominated by: Mike Fitzpatrick
Born: 1978
Ireland
Lives/works: Germany
Statement
Sean Lynch continues to investigate and shine a spotlight on a wide range of forgotten historical subjects. Using his practice as a platform against the cultural amnesia that surround varied topics, Lynch’s research, photographs and installations advocate a kind of activism towards history. He discloses and builds upon fragile stories and objects, magnifying traces of their often-idiosyncratic existence. Throughout Europe the culture of progress predominates rather than a culture of survival. Lynch is specifically interested in the friction between these two processes, often referring to Walter Benjamin’s subtle notion of ‘revolutionary nostalgia,’ that of an active remembering that reinterprets the role of history in critical relation to contemporary discourse. Lynch’s speculative and inquisitive energy seems to circulate everywhere things appear to be undervalued. He has investigated alleged supernatural trees, in danger of destruction from Ireland’s new motorways in the video work Latoon. In Finding Richard Long, he traces the contemporary condition of Long’s sculptures in the Irish landscape. Previous works have encountered the history of the Eurovision Song Contest, considered the office workers of Mies Van Der Rohe’s Seagram building in New York, and researched Joseph Beuys’ visits to Ireland. In recent months, he has been searching for the mythical island of HyBrazil, last seen in the Atlantic Ocean in 1872. Lynch’s venture is to pick up these marginalized fragments, and to renegotiate them into alternative configurations. His gallery presentations become an open space for the feedback of history and myth to occur, and allow a place for the continued recovery of further tales and forgotten histories.
Recent Exhibitions (Download full CV here)
Solo: Heaven's Full, London (2008) Limerick City Gallery of Art (2007) Ritter & Staiff, Frankfurt (2006) Group: Dangling Man, Office Baroque, Antwerp (2007) Overtake: reinterpretation of modern art, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork (2007) Premio Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan (2006)
