Cian McLoughlin is a Dublin based artist. To date he has had six solo shows in Dublin and one in New York. He has featured in many group exhibitions including at the National Gallery of Ireland, the National Portrait Gallery in London, The Saatchi Gallery, the RUA, Art Miami, Art Toronto, King’s Palace London and the RHA.

His two most recent solo shows were Tronies (2017) – a series of head paintings reinterpreting the tronie genre of the Flemish Baroque and Dutch Golden Age, one of which was purchased by the National Gallery of Ireland in 2019 for its permanent collection – and Madness and the Cure for Madness (2021) – a series of large scale paintings exploring the crowd as metaphor for loss of self and an arena for the expression of our strongest emotions.

This lithograph is part of an ongoing series I’ve been developing for several years. Titled ‘Tronies’, it comprises a series of abstract heads reinterpreting the tronie genre of head paintings from the Flemish Baroque and Dutch Golden Age. The term ‘tronie’ translates as ‘head’, ‘face’ or ‘countenance’. It was applied to depictions of the head and face that are not portraits in the traditional sense, but which are studies of expression, type, physiognomy or character.