Nolan was born in 1930 at the
Curragh Camp,
County Kildare, to Lieutenant Colonel Martin Leo Nolan (the first teacher at the Cadet College there in 1928) and his wife Mary Florence Carroll. and first exhibited at the
Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1955 and at the
Royal Hibernian Academy, RHA, in 1956, before relocating to London for a few years. By the early 1960s, Nolan was back in Dublin drawing cartoons for
Dublin Opinion and other publications, while his art gradually transitioned from watercolours and oil landscapes to abstract art and sculpture. His first solo show was at the Dublin Painters Gallery in 1963, and he was an active member in the establishment of the
Project Arts Centre in Abbey Street in 1966–67. Over the decades Nolan continued to exhibit at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, as well as taking part in the annual RHA exhibitions and at the
Oireachtas festivals. He had one-man exhibitions at Dublin's United Arts Club,
Kenny Gallery in Galway, Northern Ireland Arts Gallery in Belfast, the Grafton Gallery in Dublin, as well as at several at the Project and at the RHA. His solo April 1976 show at the Project was opened by
Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, president of Ireland. His last show was a major retrospective ‘Works 1984 to 1999’ at the RHA Gallagher Gallery in Dublin in 1999. Notable commissions include one for
Scott Tallon Walker Architects, an 18-foot long work for
University College Galway, and an outdoor sculpture for
Mayo County Council. The
Arts Council of Northern Ireland awarded him "Art in Context" First Place in 1975. For a period in the 1970s and 1980s he taught at the
Dún Laoghaire College of Art and Design. Nolan, along with colleagues
Seán Hillen and
Dermot Seymour, was featured in a 2005 exhibition of Irish artists hosted by the
European Central Bank in Frankfurt. His work is represented in the collections of the
Arts Council of Ireland, the
Irish Museum of Modern Art,
University College Dublin,
National University of Ireland Galway,
St James's Hospital (Dublin), the
Bank of Ireland, the
National Self-Portrait Collection at the
University of Limerick,
Raidió Teilifís Éireann,
Crawford Art Gallery (Cork), and in numerous private collections. Public installations of his sculpture have included works put on permanent display at
Dublin Airport,
Castlebar (County Mayo),
Navan (County Meath), and
Jordanstown (County Antrim). Of his own oeuvre Nolan said, "My works are a unity of painting and sculpture: spatial-colour-structure. It is of real space and colour, as opposed to illusory space." Critic Cyril Barrett noted: "Since the mid-1980s he has used strips of coloured paper for his reliefs. These reliefs are very varied and, with the play of light and shadow, that comes from the strip in relief, achieve a far greater richness and nuance of colour than colours on a plane surface." Nolan had a lifelong passion for physics and astronomy; two of his uncles,
JJ Nolan and
PJ Nolan, were prominent physicists. He also wrote an unpublished humorous play, in which
Eratosthenes' ancient Greek quest to calculate the circumference of the Earth is placed in a Dublin context. ==Awards==