Bio

Shane Keisuke Berkery is a contemporary figurative painter with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art. Since graduating from the National College of Art and Design, Ireland, Berkery has developed a notable practice, exhibiting his work extensively both nationally and internationally having held solo exhibitions in Ireland and the US.
Berkery has been honoured with the prestigious Hennessy-Craig Award from the Royal Hibernian Academy and has his work included in the Irish state collection. His paintings have been showcased in esteemed institutions such as the National Gallery of Ireland and the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Artistic statment

I approach painting as a tool of meditation in examining my incessantly racing mind. In figurative painting, I find a unique potential to bridge our inner-experience and external-reality. It can simultaneously mimic our perceptions of the world while portraying the idiosyncratic ways they are represented within our minds.

I am fascinated by the processes through which thought and imagery emerge from the unknowable depths of consciousness. I see the act of painting as echoing this mechanism. Marks on their own only encode the intention, chance and time that created them, but through their cumulation occurs an emergence of image. In my practice I aim to capture the tension of that crossover point and the energy of becoming.

The process of painting allows me to sift through and contextualise the chaos of my internal world; and enter my own mundane perceptions and memories of Being into a visual conversation with art history and contemporary culture.