Una O’Grady

UNA O’GRADY – Born 1976
Una O’ Grady, North Belfast born and bred, is a Fine Art graduate of the University of Ulster. She is probably best known for her paintings of Belfast.
She has had numerous successful solo shows in the Emer Gallery and An Culturlann, Belfast and group shows in for example, the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Cresent Arts Centre and Market Place, Armagh.
Previous exhibitions have focused in the main on ‘Irish Landscape’ – typified by perhaps Una’s best known work ‘The Burren’ which was ‘snapped up’ at her Degree Show in the University of Ulster, by Theo Snoddy, heading to its new home at the very heart of the prestigious U.T.V Collection, in Havelock House. Her work also appears in the Queens University Collection, BBC Public Archive Collection and the Northern Bank Collection. She has exhibited in the Royal Ulster Academy achieving a special award there in 2001.
Her characteristic sense of synergy, freshness and so often, that layer of ‘humour’ is evident through her oil paintings.
Belfast Telegraph’s Art Critic Liz Baird, comments on Una’s 2008 solo show; ‘There are the so often captured yellow cranes, the streets of terraced houses, the rows of Black Taxis and the ‘Falls Taxi Man’, a very typical figure in a baggy jacket, patterned sweater and glasses. All of this has been done before a thousand times but what raises O’Grady’s work above the rest is her wonderful, unique, very easy style. This fresh, bold vigorous style is full of movement and immediacy. I definitely think this is one artist to keep an eye on.’