Solo Exhibition at Backwater Artists Studio 12, 21th November – 19th December 2025
This new body of work takes its inspiration from ‘Visions of Genius,’ a major Hieronymus Bosch exhibition in his native city, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands, which Hanrahan visited in 2016. The Haywain triptych in particular captivated Hanrahan and sparked an interest in ontology, the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.
The exhibition explores how entities are read or perceived within a landscape or spatial scene. In the text, The Ontology of Landscapes by Adam Andrzejewski and Matusz Slawa, the writers observe that philosophers typically consider the landscape in terms of 18th-century concepts and early modern painting as picturesque. They propose an alternative theory: an experience-based landscape ontology, seeing landscapes as perspectival entities. Hanrahan uses this theory as a substructure for his interest in ontology, relating it to how viewers frame narratives within his work. By experiencing aesthetic appreciation and reading the surface as a story, the viewer becomes present with the work, questioning the stories within it and evoking psychological memories and experiences.
