State-of-the-Arts Gallery presents our autumn exhibition ‘Urban Soul’ by Ireland artist Erin de Burca. This series of paintings portrays the soul of city life, inviting the viewers from Hong Kong to reflect on their desire and life as an urban citizen. The exhibition runs from 22nd September to 6th November, 2011, showing these paintings of realistic cityscape.

Erin de Burca’s cityscape paintings are said to be melancholic in style, using subdued palette to convey the complexities and dilemmas of urban life. Her paintings feature magnificent urban architecture as the main subject, reminding us of the heights to which humankind can rise yet still feeling inconsequential and inadequate. The buildings’ permanent existence and our ephemeral transience become the inevitable duality in urban life, it also becomes the source of question and confusion to urban people.

Born in Dublin in 1960, Erin has spent her time travelling in various countries before settling in Calpe, Spain. Her hometown Dublin and her childhood memories there has been her source of inspirations. It is actually after visiting other countries and experiencing different cultures that she has become more aware of the permanence of her Irish identity and how her perception is colored by Irish culture. These can be seen from the way she uses colors and her unpeopled paintings, leaving space for viewers to interpret their own urban souls form the works.

Urban souls are complex beings. We have to live in a world filled with promises and compromises, deal with the loneliness of the individual among throngs of people, and find the end that bridges these dualities. Erin, in her paintings, paints the longing for and possibility of a better life and happiness of all the urban souls.