Christopher Banahan

Christopher Banahan holds a B.A. in Fine Art, First class Hon’s from the Nottingham Trent University (1978-81), an M.A. Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, University of London (1982-4) and an M.A. Production & Direction, Huston Film School, NUIG Galway (2012-3).

Christopher Banahan is known for his reflective portraits of childhood in which children’s faces are viewed, with a certain posed formality, through patterned fabric screens, a device that bestows a distanced, retrospective quality. It’s a mood that fits the artist, Thomas Brezing’s title phrase ”remember when we were older" in the way it proposes a future recollection, a way of looking at the present as though we are already looking back on it.

Banahan works on wood, often allowing the grain to maintain a stubborn, residual presence, coming through the image, adding to the sense of duration, imparting the feeling that the image is tenuous, immaterial, barely there against the immensity of time.