Seán McSweeney was born in Dublin in 1935. Self-taught as a painter, he lived in Wicklow for many years before moving to the west coast of Sligo in the 1980s, surrounding himself with the landscape that became the leitmotif of his work. He died in the summer of 2018.
Consistently drawn to the characteristic "horizontality" of the bogland, sea fields and flat expanses of shoreline that surrounded his home near the coast, he returned repeatedly to the same subjects, painting them in various lights and through the changing seasons. The resulting paintings, drawings and prints verge on abstraction: bog pools are reduced to rectangular shapes bordered by grasses and plants, while coastlines are represented by bands of colour that demarcate the boundaries between land, sea and sky.
Seán McSweeney began exhibiting at the Cavendish Gallery on Parnell Square, opposite the Gate Theatre, in the late 1950s and featured in the first Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1962. He had his first solo show with Leo Smith's Dawson Gallery in 1965 and has been represented by Taylor Galleries since 1978.
The recipient of numerous awards and prizes, he exhibited extensively in Ireland and abroad and was an Honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy and a member of Aosdána. His work is represented in private collections in Ireland, the UK, Europe and North America, as well as public collections including The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, Trinity College Dublin, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Ballinglen Arts Foundation and Boyle Civic Collection.