SIX CONTEMPORARY IRISH artists will get the chance to show off their talent to the American market next month.

An exhibition called Radhairc will take place at the prestigious American Irish Historical Society’s HQ on 5th Avenue – right across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This showcase will highlight the work of Hughie O’Donoghue (Mayo), Colin Davidson (Belfast), Stephen Lawlor (Dublin), Katherine Boucher Beug (Cork), Donald Teskey (Limerick) and Keith Wilson (Belfast).

While all work with paint, their work spans a range of styles from large-scale portraiture to abstraction to classical landscape painting.The exhibition will run from 4 May until 30 June.

However, those of us not lucky enough to be jetting off to New York in the near future can catch a glimpse of the work of one of the six. Stephen Lawlor, a master printmaker, started painting landscapes 12 years ago but he has recently started venturing into intimate portraiture.

Recent paintings from Lawlor are on view from this weekend until 14 June in the Oliver Sears Gallery on Dublin’s Molesworth Street. The works featured are from the Beyond the House of Carmen and Figure Painting series. The former are a series of wistful landscapes referring to a house above a village in Andalusia, north of Malaga in Spain. The latter is a series of stripped-back portraits of people.

This will give you a taste of the Lawlor paintings: