Seán O’Huiginn
Ambassador of Ireland

The painterly eye and the painterly hand, so evidently the foundation of Anne Donnelly's artistic work, is nowadays almost a minority tradition in the free-wheeling categories of modern art. Yet no other tradition offers such a subtle window into a painter's sensibility, or lays out more comprehensively the process of reflection and craft by which the artist shaped the final work.
In Anne Donnelly's impressive body of work we see the record of two different journeys: There is the journey which took her from her native Ireland to the Mediterranean world, and specifically to Italy, her present home. It is a journey which can be read in her palette, which ranges from the verdant greens of her canal-lock paintings - which could be a perfect transposition into paint of Patrick Kavanagh's great poem on the Grand Canal in Dublin, “so stilly greeny at the heart of summer” – to the sun-scorched yellows and tawny ochres of the Mediterranean landscapes of her adopted home.
Her work is also a clear record of a second journey, a journey inwards to an individual vision which gives her art its manifest coherence. The refinement of that vision is readable in the sequence of her work, and culminates in a style which is instantly recognisable as hers, however different the subject matter. Her range of subjects reflects an immediacy of vision and observation where simple things are caught in images which somehow convey the dignity and beauty they enjoy as part of creation – the spiritual undertone in Anne Donelly's paintings is perhaps one of the secrets of their impact. Some themes recur – the arrays of trees that shape and are shaped by the landscapes, birds as soaring symbols of freedom or the aspiration to freedom, but also in the wry familiarity of their domestic incarnations, female heads which are so gravely hieratic that they might have come from some ancient depiction of womanly rituals now forever lost – all bear the stamp of Anne Donnelly's ever more finely honed artistic instinct and of a vision which enriches the viewers

Orlando Corsetti
President of the "Historical Centre" City Council Rome

This great artist confronts nature with emotional intensity and lyrical inspiration. In her paintings, atmospheric still-lives, magic faces of women and skies of cobalt blue etched with the flight of sea-gulls and the splendid coast of her native Ireland, a world of intense poetry emerges.
Anne Donnelly possesses an elegant style characterized by a vivid palette.
Her works evoke the atmosphere of her travels in Andalusia, Marocco and the Greek Islands.
The artist was born in Belfast but now lives in Italy, near Tivoli, at the gates of Rome, here she decided to take up residence, close to the ruins of Hadrian's Villa, in '67, with her family, fours daughters and her husband Carlo Mazzantini, acclaimed writer and poet, deceased in 2006.
Much appreciated by italian and foreign critics, member of DUNA which is part of the International Association of Woman Artists, during her long career she has taken part in innumerable national and international exhibitions.
We are very happy and proud to host this exhibition of Anne Donnelly's paintings in the historical Centre of Rome.