Artist Bio
Finbar Cian McHugh is an artist based in Galway, Ireland. On walls and wood he paints with spray paint and emulsion; on canvas and paper, with spray paint, oil pastel and watercolour. Some of his paintings are made outdoors in collaboration with nature, where wind, sun and weather crack and blend the paint. He also makes installations and 3D work. His work has explored thought, time, feeling, meditation and healing. His recent work turns to togetherness and our relationship with the land.
Finbar began painting graffiti in 2004, the same year he started facilitating community art workshops, and he has run workshops and given talks ever since. From 2008 to 2014 he painted graffiti and street art across Europe. He lived for a time in Berlin and painted in Prague, Budapest, Wrocław, Jelenia Góra, Nantes, London, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Belfast. He busked his way through France as a street artist, painting people’s names for passers-by, including outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Along the way he earned an honours BA in Visual Communications from Limerick School of Art and Design (2010). He returned to Galway in 2014 and built his studio in Woodquay the following year.
In 2015 he painted Poetry Walls with Cúirt International Festival of Literature. These were abstract paintings on large buildings, including four-storey gables, each responding to a poem he chose from that year’s festival. It was the first project of its kind in Galway city. That year he also made public work in response to Ireland’s marriage equality referendum. He also made Love vs Fear, an immersive installation at Galway Arts Centre that asked whether we act from love or from fear. Also in 2015, for University Hospital Galway with Saolta Arts, he made Time, an installation for mental health awareness. It had 15 large-scale works in the main foyer about time, meditation and presence, along with interactive workshops and thousands of free zines combining his art and writing. Both Love vs Fear and Time were made in black and white, reflecting thought itself and black-and-white thinking.
Feelings, a solo show at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, in 2017, moved from black and white into colour and emotion. Paintings from the series now hang in homes, restaurants and public spaces, and hotels and companies have acquired other works. In 2018 came Floating, a solo show with Baboró International Children’s Festival about where we go when we daydream. Alongside the exhibition, Finbar ran workshops for 600 children, leading meditations and conversations about the work. In 2019 he painted murals in homes, hospitals and education centres in Kolkata, India, with the Hope Foundation, which works with street children. In 2020 he released Healing, an online collection of 11 paintings exploring the process of healing.
In 2023 Finbar travelled to the HUMAn Symposium in Romania. There he made Împreună (Romanian for “together”), a contemporary standing-stone circle of paintings responding to the ancient Cucuteni civilisation. The local community helped him build the space around the paintings as a place for meditation and connection. Later that year he was one of 84 artists from 83 countries at the Silk Road Artists’ Rendezvous in China, held alongside the first Liangzhu Forum. He made work at several sites, including the Liangzhu UNESCO World Heritage site, and wrote poetry. His paintings were exhibited at the China Academy of Art’s Liangzhu campus and entered the Rendezvous collection.
Chaos to Light (2024) was a large body of work, including four 10-metre paintings among many other large works. It was exhibited in the feature film Learning to Breathe Underwater, presented as the work of one of its characters, with Galway Airport transformed into an exhibition space to hold it. In 2025 he showed two back-to-back solo exhibitions at Coffeewerk + Press, Liminal and Emergence, each made up of several series. Emergence was also an installation. It showed paintings on torn paper, made outdoors in Ennistymon in collaboration with the land, alongside raku ceramics he made in Romania.
For years Finbar has made soul paintings in spray paint. Each is made for one person: he sits with them in presence, then paints his impressions of the energy he sees and feels. In February 2026, on a month’s residency at Áras Éanna on Inis Oírr, he developed small soul paintings in oil pastel and watercolour with people from the island community, and spent time on photography and writing. That May, for Romanian Creative Week, he showed Portal 2026 in JOY, an exhibition at Golia Tower in Iași. It is a 5 m × 4 m painting on wooden blocks that were custom-built with architects and carpenters. From his studio in Galway, he now makes soul paintings for people and is exploring more collaborations with the land.