Kevin Mooney: 'Horror films became a visual thing that has stayed with me' 

Cork-based artist Kevin Mooney's exhibition at IMMA  reveals influences from the likes of Van Gogh and Goya, as well as 1980s movies 

Kevin Mooney - Ilcruthach (left) and Kevin Mooney - Emigré (right).

Vincent Van Gogh, Peig Sayers and 1980s horror movies may not on the face of it have very much in common. But all are grist to the mill for Cork-based artist Kevin Mooney, whose solo exhibition Revenants is currently showing at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.

Revenants is mostly inspired by Mooney’s fascination with the notable gap in Irish art history in the hundreds of years up to the mid-18th century. “Before that,” he says, “you had the illuminated manuscripts being produced in the monasteries in the medieval period, but then there were centuries when it seems like there was no art being made at all, and that coincided with a pattern of famine, poverty and mass emigration.”