1. Robert Ballagh is an Irish artist, painter and designer.
66 Facts About Robert Ballagh
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Robert Ballagh is known for his hyperrealistic renderings of Irish literary, historical and establishment figures, or designing more than 70 Irish postage stamps and a series of banknotes, and for work on theatrical sets, including for works by Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde, and for Riverdance in multiple locations.
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Robert Ballagh's work has been exhibited at many solo and group shows since 1967, in Dublin, Cork, Brussels, Moscow, Sofia, Florence, Lund and others, as well as touring in Ireland and the US.
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Robert Ballagh's work is held in a range of museum and gallery collections.
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Robert Ballagh was chosen to represent Ireland at the 1969 Biennale de Paris.
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Robert Ballagh has received a number of awards, including an honorary doctorate from UCD.
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Robert Ballagh has published a book of photography of Dublin, and a volume of memoirs.
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Robert Ballagh attended a private primary school, Miss Meredith's School for Young Ladies on Pembroke Road, and then the fee-paying St Michael's College and Blackrock College.
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Robert Ballagh's parents were members of the Royal Dublin Society, one of Ireland's most active learned societies, and he spent time in its library and looking at its collection of art books, while collecting American comics and frequenting the local cinema, not just to watch films but observing for hours the sign painter at work.
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Robert Ballagh began to work on art seriously in 1959, and some of his early works, including a self-portrait, were later exhibited as part of a retrospective show at the Gorry Gallery.
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Robert Ballagh worked in both Dublin and for a few months, London, as a draughtsman, a postman and a designer.
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Two early pieces of three-dimensional art, an erotic torso and a pinball machine, were selected to appear at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1967, and Robert Ballagh has appeared in a range of group exhibitions since.
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Robert Ballagh next turned to political themes, notably connected to Northern Ireland but with elements inspired by the Civil Rights movement in the US and the reaction to the Vietnam War.
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Robert Ballagh started to combine elements of social realism with US advertising forms after reading Che Guevara's essay Man and Socialism in Cuba.
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Robert Ballagh was selected to represent Ireland at the 1969 Biennale de Paris, and his work has been shown in solo exhibitions from that year onwards.
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Robert Ballagh was commissioned by his former tutor, Robin Walker, to produce abstract designs for screens in the new restaurant building of University College Dublin.
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Robert Ballagh started to work on portraiture with Irish contemporary art collector Gordon Lambert in 1971.
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Robert Ballagh used formica, and included himself, his wife and his daughter in the mural, entitled People and a Frank Stella.
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Robert Ballagh, drawing on scenes from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by locally-born Lawrence Sterne, painted a series of panels for a local restaurant.
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Robert Ballagh had earlier painted Joyce in a scene on O'Connell Street, Dublin's main street, with himself alongside.
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Robert Ballagh worked on a portrait of Watson over an extended period; it hangs in the Genetics Institute of Trinity College Dublin.
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At Watson's request, Robert Ballagh painted Watson's colleague Francis Crick for a major institution in London, and at the unveiling was one of just two people to meet the Queen, who commented that the portrait was "interesting".
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Robert Ballagh used himself and family members as models for generic characters, and, for example, painted two pictures of his daughter in homage to Marilyn Monroe, Rachel as Marilyn I and II.
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Robert Ballagh has served as a judge for a number of artistic competitions, including one for murals in West Belfast.
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Robert Ballagh has led community arts work in both Dublin and Belfast, and taught art in prisons.
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For many years, Robert Ballagh rented an attic-level studio on Parliament Street in Dublin, overlooking City Hall; this studio had previously been leased by other artists, such as Patrick Collins.
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Robert Ballagh renovated the building, and it now hosts his studio and a small flat.
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Robert Ballagh has designed over 70 Irish postage stamps, as well as a series of Irish banknotes, "Series C", the last series before the introduction of the euro.
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Robert Ballagh has worked on set design for both travelling shows and plays and events based in Ireland.
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Robert Ballagh was approached to try this type of work by the director of Dublin's Gate Theatre, Michael Colgan.
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Robert Ballagh did set work for the Dublin Theatre Festival.
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Robert Ballagh was designer for the opening ceremonies for two major sporting events hosted in Ireland, the 2003 Special Olympics World Summer Games and the 2006 Ryder Cup.
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Robert Ballagh has had solo shows in Dublin on several occasions, as well as in Brussels, Paris, Lund in Sweden, Warsaw, Moscow and Sofia.
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In 1982, Robert Ballagh was invited to put on a "mid-term retrospective" show in Lund in southern Sweden, which proceeded in 1983.
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Robert Ballagh was invited to the 1969 IELA, which had to move from the College of Art on Merrion Square to venues in Cork and Belfast.
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Robert Ballagh was invited, in 1987, to participate in a peace forum and associated major exhibition in the Soviet Union, at the Cosmos Hotel in northeastern Moscow, a rare invitation for an Irish artist.
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Robert Ballagh received the Carroll Prize at IELA 1969, and the Alice Berger Hammerschlag Award, an all-island award for practitioners of the "plastic arts", at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 1971.
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Robert Ballagh was a founding member of Ireland's national academy or "affiliation" of artists, Aosdana, in 1981, and its first chairperson.
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Robert Ballagh ceased active participation in the body in the early 1990s, after what he felt was undue pressure to declare his personal views in a debate about censorship.
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Robert Ballagh was made a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, one of only two Irish fellows.
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Robert Ballagh was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters in 2013 by University College Dublin.
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Robert Ballagh was the first chairperson of the Artists Association of Ireland, and the founding chairperson of the Irish Visual Artists Rights Organisation.
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Robert Ballagh's paintings are held in several public collections of Irish painting including those of the National Gallery of Ireland, the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, the Ulster Museum, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, along with the collections of Trinity College Dublin, the Musee des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds and Nuremberg's Albrecht Durer House.
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Robert Ballagh did so many different things, had so many styles and approaches.
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Robert Ballagh has espoused the causes of socialism, republicanism, workers' rights and nuclear disarmament.
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Robert Ballagh has long campaigned for artists' rights, notably in regard to resale, and for better funding for the arts.
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Robert Ballagh pursued the question of resale rights, assured by EU law but late to be implemented in Ireland, threatening, and later pursuing, legal action; the right was eventually established.
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Robert Ballagh has pursued this aim individually and in his roles in the Artists Association of Ireland, and the Irish Visual Artists Rights Organisation.
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Robert Ballagh worked with the UNESCO-associated body of artists, the International Association of Art, to the executive committee of which he was elected, and on which he served as treasurer for three years; this work involved considerable travel and his work on the representational bodies made him so busy in 1987 that he painted nothing at all.
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Robert Ballagh has commented that Ireland's funding of the arts is poor by EU and OECD standards.
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Robert Ballagh is the president of the Ireland Institute for Historical and Cultural Studies, which promotes studies of republicanism in an international context.
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Robert Ballagh was on the committee of a major group campaigning for a "No" vote in Ireland's referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.
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Also in July 2011, Robert Ballagh broke ranks with his colleagues involved with the travelling production of Riverdance over their decision to perform in Israel.
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Robert Ballagh is an active member of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which has asked that artists and academics participate in boycotts of Israeli businesses and cultural institutions.
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In July 2012, Robert Ballagh said he was "ashamed and profoundly depressed" at the en masse closure of Irish galleries and museums.
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Robert Ballagh cited an example of some Americans and Canadians on holiday in Ireland.
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Robert Ballagh published a book of Dublin photography, taken over a year on a Rolleiflex camera, accompanied by quotations from James Joyce, in the 1980s.
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Robert Ballagh released an autobiographical volume, A Reluctant Memoir, in 2018; it is not written as a chronological summary of his life but consists of a range of short pieces around major events.
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Robert Ballagh was the guest speaker at the 2012 Ledwidge Day commemoration at Islandbridge.
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Robert Ballagh met his future wife Betty in 1965, when she was 16 and he was playing a musical gig.
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The couple originally purchased one artisan's dwelling, then a row of them which they merged into a single architect-designed dwelling, with Robert Ballagh participating in the design.
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The finished building, Robert Ballagh House, was later profiled in Architecture Ireland, the official journal of architects in Ireland, and featured on a TV show.
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Betty Robert Ballagh fell and received a brain injury in 1986, falling into a coma and requiring an operation to remove a clot; it took her years to fully recover.
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Robert Ballagh's parents died within three months of each other in 1990.
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Robert Ballagh later sued on grounds of negligence by the Health Service Executive and members of its staff, and received a settlement.
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Robert Ballagh had chemotherapy treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, and recovered fully; he subsequently received a diagnosis of type II diabetes.