Alan Phelan works in sculpture, photography, film, museum interventions, public art and collaborations with other artists, writers and curators. Born Dublin, 1968, Phelan received BA, Dublin City University, 1989 and MFA, Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, 1994.
Selected exhibitions include: In Minor Keys, La Biennale di Venezia, Casino Marino, Dublin; Luan, Athlone; The Molesworth Gallery, Dublin; Void, Derry; Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; RHA, Dublin; The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon; The Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery, Irish Museum of Modern Art, The LAB, Dublin; TBG+S, Dublin; LCGA, EVA International, Limerick; Solstice, Navan; Chapter, Cardiff; Bonn Kunstmuseum; Detroit Stockholm; Treignac Projet, France; Bozar, Brussels: ล KUC, Ljubljana; SKC Gallery, Belgrade; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Public works include Kevin Street Library; Fr Collins Park, IMMA formal gardens and Void Offsites, Derry. His most recent public work is for DCC/Sculpture Dublin, the OโConnell Plinth Commission, a temporary sculpture outside City Hall, Dublin which was moved to the TU Dublin Grangegorman campus on longterm loan.
As an artist, Alan Phelan works across photography, film, sculpture, text, public art, museum interventions and collaborative projects. His practice often begins with a biography, event, historical process or cultural fragment, which he then reworks through images, objects, titles and display. Earlier projects connected to Roger Casement, John Joly, Gordon Bennett and others using references to the Lumiรจre brothers, Larry Johnson, and Jean Genet. These are not used as simple subjects or portraits; they become ways to examine how cultural memories are formed, circulated and sometimes forgotten via reputations, inventions, and public stories.
Across his work, Phelan combines historical research with a strong interest in materials and formats: reconstructed photographic processes, public sculpture, printed matter, text works and site-responsive installations. His recent Joly and RGB works revisit an early Irish colour photography process through backlit photographs, window vinyls, paintings, sculpture and public commissions, placing John Jolyโs overlooked invention in dialogue with better-known histories of colour, display and technological success. In projects such as RGB Sconce, Hold Your Nose, The List and The Line and Temporal Furniture, Phelan uses civic sites, historic interiors with obsolete technologies as active parts of the work. Phelan’s practice lies in making complex situations where personal, queer, technological and political histories can be held together without being reduced to a single message.
