Baggot Street Painting 1

From the late 1960s, figurative elements in Cecil King's work were replaced by plain fields of colour and geometric forms. Baggot Street Painting I belongs to the 'Baggot Street Series', 1969 - another work from this series is in the permanent collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. As with the present work, the artist's connection to different cities is often explicit in the titles of his paintings, as he sought to distil his experience of the place into his work.

Cecil King is one of Ireland's most significant modern artists. He played a huge role in the advancement and appreciation of contemporary art in Ireland, co-founding the Contemporary Irish Art Society in the early 1960s and Rosc in 1967. In 1981, King had his first retrospective at the Hugh Lane Gallery and in 2021 they commemorated the centenary of his birth with another exhibition entitled Cecil King - Present in Time Future. In 2008 the Irish Museum of Modern Art held a major solo exhibition of his work, Cecil King - A Legacy of Painting.