Born in Ireland in 1928, Brian O’Doherty is a self-taught artist based in New York since 1960. One of the pioneering generation of conceptual art, O’Doherty produced many seminal works including the Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1966-7) and an early exhibition in a box, Aspen 5+6 (1967). He changed his artist name to Patrick Ireland in protest at the killings of civil rights marchers in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1972. With the advent of civic government in the North, Patrick Ireland was buried in a ceremony celebrating peace at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, on May 20th 2008. For thirty-six years Patrick Ireland exhibited throughout the United States and Europe a unique series of installations called Rope Drawings. Major retrospectives of O’Doherty/Ireland’s work were held at the National Museum of American Art (1986), The Elvehjem Museum of Art (1993), The Butler Institute of American Art (1994), and Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane (2006) which travelled to the Grey Art Gallery, New York (2007).

O’Doherty/Ireland’s art is held in numerous private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane, Dublin; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; National Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle WA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.