Search Results for 'John Behan'

Some €410,000 worth of fine art, Irish art, old masters, antiques, silver, and other items was sold at auction by Fonsie Mealy auctioneers last week.

Fonsie Mealy auctioneers will conduct a two day auction comprising more than 900 lots on March 7 and 8. The auction will take place at The Chatsworth Auction Rooms, Chatsworth Street, Castlecomer, Co Kilkenny.

On Friday November 29 1940, a tiny new bookshop opened its doors for the first time on High Street in Galway city. Little could its proprietors, Des and Maureen Kenny, have then envisaged that this modest business start-up – embarked upon when Ireland was in the early stages of World War II rationing - would go on to be one of Ireland’s foremost bookshops and art galleries and, over its six decades, a valued friend to many of the country’s most eminent writers and artists.

THE KENNY Gallery and Bookshop has reached its 75th year in business and to mark this platinum milestone, it hosts an exhibition, celebrating through 75 different objects, the fascinating history of this family-owned Galway institution.

Artists can be very awkward at times. They don’t always conform to decisions made on their behalf. They rarely behave nicely if they disagree with authority.

The Great Famine of 1845-51 was, the Galway historian Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh tells us*, ‘a subsistence crisis, and a social calamity without parallel in the 19th century. It resulted in more than 1,000,000 dying of starvation and related diseases; and it ‘precipitated a virtual tidal wave of emigration that would see 4,000,000 flee the country during the following 20 years’. 

Whatever about the discrimination against the Irish emigrants in both Britain and America as they fled the ravages of the Great Famine in the mid 19th century, the effect of gaining a foothold in the two major English speaking countries of the world, pretty much sounded the death knell for the Irish language. 

STARTING IN the early seventies and continuing for about 20 years, there was a continuous migration into Galway of extraordinary “blow ins” whose genius and drive transfigured the cultural life of the city.

It was something of a red letter day at Kenny’s Gallery last Friday with the dual launch of a major new exhibition by sculptor John Behan, and a terrific book celebrating the artist, by NUIG’s Adrian Frazier, entitled John Behan: The Bull of Sheriff Street - The Life and Work of an Irish Sculptor and published by Lilliput Press.

"SOME OF those who already know about John Behan would think of him as without question a Dubliner. For others, after forty years there, he is a fundamental part of Galway."