Malachy Costello was born in Roscommon, in 1959. He is a graduate of Crawford Municipal School of Art, Cork and the Sligo Institute of Technology. Many of his paintings are inspired by the landscape of North Roscommon, Leitrim and Sligo and the interaction of man and the seasons upon it. However, this exhibition also includes still-lifes and Wexford landscapes alongside the stubble-fields and bogs of the north-west.
Since he first began exhibiting his work in 1983, Malachy Costello has participated in numerous exhibitions all over Ireland and abroad. He has had solo shows in Foxford Exhibition Centre, Mayo, Dolmen Gallery, Limerick, Castle Art Gallery, Sligo and in the Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon. In October 2007 he held a solo exhibition at the Leinster Gallery entitled "A Particular Place" which featured landscapes from Roscommon. Costello has contributed to several group exhibitions including the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, the RHA, Oireachtas and the RUA annual exhibitions.
In 2000, for his painting, ‘Winter Garden’, he was awarded the J.P. Duggan Prize for Outstanding Work at Carlow Eigse Visual Arts Festival.
His works are in the public collections of M.B.N.A., Co. Leitrim, Sligo VEC, the Municipal Collection in Cesson-Sevigne, France, as well as in many private collections in Ireland, Britain, Holland and USA.
“Costello is a thinking man’s painter, who has studied closely the configuration, light and tonality of the region in which he lives and works….he transmutes rather than transcribes. Though not a showy colourist, he is acutely sensitive to tonal subtleties and contrasts and he also has an idiosyncratic ‘touch’ with paint… and yet, somehow, I suspect there is still much more to come”.
Brian Fallon, 2007.
Malachy Costello Bio (click to view)
