Oliver Lawlor graduated from Crawford College of Art & Design Cork with a First Class Honours Degree in Fine Art in 2008. And was awarded the Degree Show Purchase Prize 2008. He is already in the OPW and in important private collections. I have studied painting for four years at Crawford College of Art and design, and received a 1st class honours degree this year. "I am now enrolled in a masters of Philosophy program in UCC", he explains. "Both eastern and western philosophy holds a central position in the evaluation and appreciation of my art from a humanist sociological aspect. It manifests an amalgam, of a western European post Cartesian modernist position, and the post-modern aspects which conjoin zen Buddhist philosophy to a post -Nitzschean reductivist position, which posits the void, ( as propagated and expounded by artists like Yves Klein and Ad Reinhardt), with the western -European portrayal of the human condition as expressed and defined by nothingness. The works of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Jean Paul Sartre all play an important part in contributing to how my work can be seen as a post-structuralist evaluation of an aspect of human solidarity.

"That the paintings themselves can and should be appreciated in and off themselves is of course paramount, and thus the also fit comfortably into the strong tradition of peinture-peinture. In this way my paintings can be seen as a bridge between a post-Socratic modernity, and a transcendent modernism on the one side , to a post-structural interpretation of nothingness."