Salvatore of Lucan

Salvatore Fullam (born 1994), known professionally as Salvatore of Lucan, is an Irish artist from Lucan, Dublin. The Irish Museum of Modern Art described his work as featuring "expansive domestic scenes where realism meets the uncanny, and the familiar broaches the magical."

Life Fullam is mixed race, with a Bangladeshi father and an Irish mother. He did not know his father growing up

Fullam's uncle was a self-taught artist whose surrealist oil paintings were "all over" the house as he grew up. He remembers looking at them as a child and trying to figure out their meaning.

Fullam met his father for the first time in 2018 in New York, The format recalls renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, who were often known by their place of birth.

He has described being asked where he is from often, despite being Irish, where he studied Fine Art Painting As Fullam explained in a 2024 interview: "I started my career by going on the dole and renting a studio that I rarely left. After about one or two years, I started getting into some group shows. Eventually I was given a show in Pallas Projects as part of their program there".

Fullam's first time exhibiting paintings outside of Ireland was at the Meštrović Pavilion in Zagreb as part of Pallas Projects '6th Biennial of Painting' in October 2021. He had been nominated twice before for the same award. The individuals in question were John Bruton, Liam Cosgrave, John A Costello, Garret FitzGerald, Charles Haughey and Jack Lynch. The work was unveiled in October 2024 at the King's Inns by then-Taoiseach Simon Harris. Irish author Megan Nolan wrote the accompanying text for the show.

In 2025, a portrait of Irish international footballer Paul McGrath commissioned by the National Gallery of Ireland went on display in the gallery's Dargan Wing.

From March to April 2026, the Dunamaise Arts Centre presented Fullam's show titled "Fancy Situations Dead Present Etc...". The Laois Nationalist described it as a "striking insight into the artist's evolving visual language, one that moves fluently between contemporary portraiture, narrative painting, and symbolic figuration."

Fullam was shortlisted for the Hennessy Craig Prize at the Royal Hibernian Academy in both 2019 and 2026.

Artistic style Fullam's paintings feature "figurative domestic scenes" where "the familiar approaches the magical". He notes: "My day to day life is also a mix between realism and imagination. So, I depict it the same way I experience them in real life".

Fullam has said that he can spend weeks just on graph paper before he starts painting a large-scale work.

Influences Fullam wanted to become a painter after his art teacher introduced him to artists such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and David Hockney in school. He subsequently discovered Egon Schiele himself.

In creating the painting Me Ma Healing Me, for which he won the Zurich Portrait Prize, Fullam said he was "inspired by the kind of uncanny, suspended feeling one finds in the alchemist paintings of Leonora Carrington".

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