Orfhlaith Egan is an Irish artist, based in Berlin, whose paintings translate the landscape and folklore of rural Ireland into saturated color and light.Raised in the Irish-speaking village of Cornamona on the shores of Lough Corrib, she starts each digital work from a physical painting that she then develops further on screen.
As a child she was drawn to the brightly painted statues and Stations of the Cross paintings in her local church. As a teenager she was recognized at school for her drawing ability and allowed to sit state art examinations even though art was not offered on the curriculum.She studied History of Art at Trinity College Dublin, graduating in 1999, then worked as a flight attendant for Royal Jordanian Airlines and later for a corporate jet operator in Saudi Arabia.She moved to Germany in 2012 and has been based in Berlin as a painter since 2015.,
Her series Landscape: Instinct & Ecstasy (2020-2021) reworks memories of the Irish landscape into saturated color, drawing on what she calls “the deeper memory world of archetypes and how they resonate in the landscape around me”. The series includes Dream Lake, inspired by an evening on the shores of Lake Garda, and Between Worlds, which draws on fire imagery and the banshee of Irish folklore. Her Dolmen series, beginning with Dolmen I, explores prehistoric standing stones as monuments in a landscape she describes as one of apparitions.Her influences include the Irish landscape painters Paul Henry and Jack B. Yeats, alongside Caspar David Friedrich and Georgia O'Keeffe.
She entered the NFT space in January 2021, presenting work on Rarible, KnownOrigin, Hic et Nunc and Kalamint.In 2022 she collaborated with the generative artist KRANKARTA on Firestarter, a bonfire of animated flames on fxhash inspired by her earlier abstract fire paintings.She was Featured Artist of the Week at the Embassy of Ireland in Berlin in May 2021, and her work was shown at LiTE-HAUS Berlin in 2022 and in the exhibitions “Equilibrium” and “Forhalla” at the Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar, Ireland, in 2022 and 2023.
