ALICE MAHER Irish, b. 1956

Alice Maher (born 1956, Co. Tipperary, Ireland) has produced some of the most iconic images in contemporary Irish art: sculpture, photography, film-drawings, installation, video, charcoal and pencil drawings, watercolours and prints. She is well known for her series of sculptures using natural materials including thorns, bees and snails; her drawings and installations using human hair, and photographic portraits of the artist embracing her own body and elements taken from the wild.

Maher's work is embedded in cultural history, mythology, folklore, fairy tales and medieval history, in which she questions our origins and identity. Engaging in a discourse on feminism, domination, and colonization, her work, both political and personal, explores the depths of the unconscious. Her re-appropriation of everyday objects, playing on confusion, and questioning the memory and cultural associations of materials, could be seen to place her work in the lineage of Surrealism. 

In her large scale charcoal drawings she embraces a process of erasing and starting over that reflects her thinking. Her more intimate small pencil drawings  explore the interior and outer body which unfold and enfold simultaneously. The human, animal and plant worlds intermingle and overlap in intense hybrid forms, affirming a feminist vision of the body in harmony with nature. She states that her work is 'not declamatory' but instead driven by a desire to 'extend figuration into other realms' and offer a haptic as well as visual poetics of form.

Alice Maher's work is held in many public collections including: Arts Council of Ireland;  British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Massachusetts and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.  Becoming, a retrospective exhibition, was held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in 2012-13..  

Alice Maher was awarded the 18th Drawing Prize, Daniel & Florence Guerlain Contemporary Art Foundation in March 2025