Born in Tipperary in 1953, John Keating studied at the Crawford School of Art, Cork, TCD and the Arts Students League of New York. Locally, he has held solo exhibitions with the Lincoln Gallery, Hendriks Gallery, Solomon Gallery and Ashford Gallery, Dublin and the Vangard Gallery, Cork. He has also exhibited in the Oireachtas, IELA, Aer Rianta Gateway to Art and RHA annual shows. Abroad, he has had work hung alongside such world renowned artists as Lucien Freud, George Baselitz and Antoni Tapies; these last two were among the 21 artists including Keating who were selected for the first Beijing International Biennale, held in 2003. In a monograph on the artist published in 2002, Ciaran Carty linked Keating’s still life paintings with those of the 17th century Dutch and Flemish painters, whose allegorical works spoke of the transience of material objects and earthly delights. So too, according to Carty, Keating’s works are “a metaphor for the cyclical nature of life and death”, a glimpsed moment of ripeness and perfection prior to decay.