Siobhán Hapaska
August – October 2009

Internationally renowned sculptor Siobhán Hapaska was resident in 2009, going on to premiere her first solo exhibition of new work in Scotland. Hapaska used the three months at GSS to produce a number of new sculptural works for the gallery, which then went on to be displayed at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery New York preceding the show. Immaculately crafted Hapaska’s works are resonant combinations of disparate images, forms and narrative styles that explore the tensions between presence and absence, life and death, nature and artifice, threat and safety, and surface and interior, while levering the heaviness of these topics with wit and pathos.

Siobhán Hapaska was born 1963 in Belfast, Northern Ireland and studied at Middlesex University and Goldsmiths College, London. She had her first major solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 1995 and subsequently at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin 2001 and 2003; Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan 2002 and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York 2007. Her most recent solo show in the UK was an exhibition of newly commissioned work for Camden Arts Centre, London 2007. She undertook a commission for Peer, London 2004 creating Playa de Los Intranquilos, an installation which was included in the British Art Show 6 2006.

Siobhán has also participated in various group exhibitions including Life? Biomorphic Forms in Sculpture, Kunthaus Graz, Austria 2009, Micro-narratives: tentation des petits realities, Musee d’Art Moderne de Saint Etienne 2008, Printemps de Septembre 2005, Extreme Abstraction at Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo 2005, a three-person exhibition with Charles Long and Ernesto Neto at Magasin 3, Stockholm 2003 and Artifice at the Deste Foundation, Athens 2000. In 1997 she took part in Documenta X, won the 1998 Irish Museum of Modern Art / Glen Dimplex Artists Award, represented Ireland at the 2001 Venice Biennale and won the Paul Hamlyn award in 2003. Siobhán Hapaska is represented by Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.