The artist in thrall to the outlaw Ned Kelly

NED Kelly rides again at the Irish Museum of Modern Art at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, where Sidney Nolan’s celebrated paintings of the outlaw are on loan until January.

“The significance of these paintings to Australian cultural heritage is massive, and the National Gallery of Australia has been extremely generous in lending the works to Ireland,” says Georgie Thompson, assistant curator of exhibitions in IMMA.

Nolan was born in 1917 in Melbourne, and studied at The National Gallery of Victoria School of Art. “He was conscripted into the army in 1942 and began to paint his immediate surroundings in the Australian outback,” Thompson says.