Michael Kane was born in 1935 in Wicklow. He studied at the National College of Art & Design and Graphic Print Studio Dublin but it was his deep involvement in seminal events in Irish Art that defined him. Michael Kane helped to organise the Independent Artists exhibitions and edited the ironic art and sociopolitical journal Structure, he was a founder of Project Arts Centre and one of the earliest members of Aosdana. Over four decades he has exhibited extensively internationally and in 1996 a retrospective at Royal Hibernian Academy ran concurrently with a major exhibition of new work at The Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Michael Kane sees painting is a conductor of meaning in human experience. His work is uncompromisingly figurative. He does not particularly stress figure or ground but both seem larger and more mythical than ordinary reality. Kane's figures make exaggerated gestures, and are themselves fashioned by large painterly gestures - yet his visceral execution draws profoundly on the intellect. Kane has decided opinions on the world, and he discloses his vision with conviction. His imagery is infused with biblical and mythological references played out on a skeletal Dublin stage. Kane has lived virtually all of his life in this city and it can be felt in the atmosphere and imagery of his works.

'Translated to the city in late adolescence my developing psyche projected itself eventually onto the life of the streets, parks and waterways of my neighbourhood and the wider metropolitan scene and their rich human comedy, as well as on the accumulated 'lumber', as Kavanagh called it, hacked out of indiscriminate reading, travel and random study in the pursuit of that other aspect of the pleasurable called, for want of a better word, spiritual or perhaps, mythic.' Michael Kane 2002

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