Swift Patrick

Patrick Swift (1927-1983) attended the College of Art in Dublin where he won a travelling scholarship to study in France and Italy. In the 1950s he settled in London and was associated with a group of artists and writers in Soho such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, George Barker and Patrick Kavanagh and in 1959 he co-founded with the poet David Wright a quarterly magazine, "X", in which Swift under a nom de plume (James Mahon), attacked abstract art as the art of the establishment. He used "X" as a means to publicise figurative artists such as Frank Auerbach and Craigie Atchison, working in London at the time, as well as reviving interest in the work of David Bomberg. In 1962 he emigrated to Portugal where he founded the Porches Pottery which started a revival of interest in indigenous traditional ceramics. Patrick Swift is little known in Ireland due to his mistrust of celebrity and his dislike of exhibitions. He had very few one man exhibitions throughout his career although he produced a significant body of paintings and works on paper. This publication and the retrospective exhibition reassess the work of one of the most intersting post war Irish artists and the context within which he worked with texts by writer Anthony Cronin, a contemporary of the artist and Aidan Dunne, art critic of the Sunday Tribune.