ADAM KOS Born in 1956 in Poland, Adam Kos attended the School of Art, Folk and Design in Ostroleka. He specialised in sculpture, woodcarving and painting. He was appointed furniture restorer to the Royal Castle in Warsaw and he subsequently worked with Paul Levi, the famous London collector and restorer of old frames. In 1986, Adam came to work in Ireland along with his wife Maria. His commissions included restoration work in Dublin Castle, Malahide Castle and City Hall. He was drawn to the spirit of the Irish Landscape, which he describes as something you cannot touch, only feel its spirit. He divided his time between Co Westmeath and Howth, where his residence looks across Dublin Bay – the same scenic landscape that William Opren and Osborne captured in their many paintings. Percy French is another Irish artist with whom Adam Kos finds an affinity. They both share certain gifts of the spirit: an uncanny mysticism, for example, and a poetic melancholy. Kos is a painter with extraordinary empathy for the Irish countryside. Taking his main influences from Frances Carot and the renowned 19th Century Irish painter, Barrett, his treatment of its many aspects – from hazy Wicklow bogs to silent, winter pastures – is full of a sense of the mystery of natural things. He excels in his treatment of light, capturing its subtle depths with a sureness few other Irish landscape painters can master. Indeed a sense of diffused light pervades many of his paintings, contributing to their misty, magical presentation. His work has developed from tentative and quite conventional little landscape into the marvellously and romantic visions of flat unobvious mid-landscape of Mullingar. Adam Kos has imbued these quite small paintings with a quality, which can be compared to the great 19th century romantic painter, Casper David Friedrich. The lowering skies and the twilit mists are a landscape of battlefields after the battle – quite after conflict. The onlooker will forever see the reality of the midlands landscape through Adam Kos’s eyes. He has made the Irish midlands his own.
