Sinead Bresiln at Andrea Festa Fine Art
I am a painter and try to create contemplative spaces that act as both a mirror and a window. I tend to use the figure as an anchor to explore metaphysical ideas—singular bodies in obscured spaces, flattened perspectives, exaggerated color. I want them to feel like dreams you can’t quite place, suspended between the past and the present. My aim is to make oil paint behave like memory: layered, emotional, unstable, and deeply alive.Sinéad Breslin
Sinéad Breslin (b. 1986, Limerick, Ireland) is a painter whose emotionally charged figurative work draws from memory, myth, and metaphysics. She lives and works between Ireland and New York City. Breslin received both her BA and Master of Fine Arts from the University of the West of England and has participated in multiple international residencies across Europe.
Her paintings operate as vivid dreamscapes where the boundaries between memory and invention dissolve. The human figure, central to her practice, often appears suspended in ambiguous, flattened settings. These figures act as both protagonists and formal elements within surreal, abstracted compositions. She frequently draws upon Irish folklore, personal photo archives, and storytelling traditions, embedding each canvas with a sense of narrative and cultural resonance. Color plays a critical role in her process—heightened, often expressionistic, and emotionally tuned—while texture and gesture bring visceral materiality to the surface.
Her solo exhibitions include Still Life (Andrea Festa Fine Art, Rome, 2021), here (Pittsburgh, 2020), Speak, Memory (Artiq, Moscow, 2020), New Paintings (Marc Straus Gallery, New York, 2019; Mauger Gallery, New York, 2018), and Pass the Salt (Secret Art Gallery, Moscow, 2014). Notable group shows include Transatlantico (Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, 2020), President’s Day Soirée (Lucas Lucas, New York, 2019), Perimetri Domestici (Palazzo Monti, Brescia, 2018), and Friends of Friends (The Third Policeman, London, 2017).
Breslin’s work is held in numerous private and institutional collections internationally. It has been featured in major art publications such as Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, Artribune, Juliet Art Magazine, and the Irish Examiner. Her evolving body of work functions as a kind of contemporary travelogue—intimate, dissonant, and vividly human.