Dan Herlihy
Atmospheric paintings exploring form, tension and the space between figuration and abstraction.
Dan Herlihy’s paintings sit somewhere between the familiar and the abstract. Working with restrained, earthy palettes and layered surfaces, he builds images around subtle shifts in form, tone and light, allowing a sense of atmosphere to emerge without fixing the work to a single narrative.
There is a distinctly cinematic quality to his paintings: elongated forms, changing horizons and carefully balanced areas of colour suggest landscapes, figures or fragments of something remembered. The result is work that feels grounded yet ambiguous, holding a quiet tension between what is revealed and what is left unresolved.
Available Work
Dan Herlihy (b. 1990, Bristol, England) lives and works in London.
His paintings explore the intersection of atmosphere and abstract form, using restrained, earthy palettes and elongated silhouettes to hold moments of tension between the grounded and the abstract.
Herlihy trained in the arts, graduating with a first-class degree, before establishing a career as an Art Director on Oscar-winning film productions, a background in visual storytelling that continues to shape his studio practice today. He builds and disrupts the surface with brush, palette knife and wedge, creating a layered, textural finish, drawn to earthy palettes for their primal quality. Subtle shifts in colour, scale and light carry the emotional weight of each piece.
His work centres on opposing forces, exploring moments where elements meet and resist, where the slightest variations in tone or balance carry significant weight. Alongside these, a series of silhouette studies, figures and animals rendered in the same pared-back palette, extends this language of tension into form.
Interested in available works or commissions?