“Thrilling, quicksilver arrangements of fierce movement, Deady’s new paintings are also, and simultaneously, models of balance, poise and restraint: amalgams of sensibility and sense, feeling and thought. With their intricate, concentric patterning and vigorous, rhythmic pulse, they relate metaphorically to the currency of daily life, the colour of moods and feelings and the dynamics of human relationships.
Occupying a space free from the rules of naturalistic representation, the paintings fuse inner and outer worlds, and allow for a longer, considered view over time. The energies of the compositions are in most cases generated by two adjoining figures, and the way they create and are in turn shaped by the traffic of interaction between them.
Powerful internal currents animate each of them, whole worlds of feeling. As with the artist’s earlier Measure for Measure works, this entails a powerful intimation of bodily presence and action: a choreography of stance, attitude, movement, gesture, nuance – and vision. Colour, sparing yet intense, sets the temperature of the mood. Spatially, we are in a zone as expansive as a biblical desert, and as abstract, in which we try to orient ourselves.” – Aidan Dunne
Opening Thursday 20th November at 6pm, Stephanie Deady – Emotional Calculus runs at The Kevin Kavanagh Gallery from Thursday November 20th – Saturday December 20th 2025
Feature Image: Stephanie Deady, Emotional Calculus, oil on birch plywood, 26 x 35.5 cm, 2025
