Richard Malone's Brussels takeover puts Irish craft textile on a political stage

On 9 July 2026, as Ireland formally assumed the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, the most photographed object in Brussels is not a treaty text or a flag ceremony. It is a cascade of brightly dyed fabric, hand-woven and sculptural, hanging in the glass atrium of the Europa building. The works are by Richard Malone, a 32-year-old artist and fashion designer from Wexford, and they constitute the largest single-artist installation the Council has hosted during a presidency handover in recent memory. The choice is as much an argument as it is a décor decision.

Ireland is using its six-month stewardship of the EU agenda to project a particular self-image: a small, bilingual, culturally confident member state that sees itself as a bridge between the union's older industrial cores and its Atlantic periphery. Malone's commission is the cultural capstone of that pitch — a textile practice rooted in the Irish midlands being placed, for six months, directly in front of the heads of government who will argue about migration, defence, the next Multiannual Financial Framework, and the bloc's relationship with a fragmenting transatlantic order. The fabric does not stay neutral in that setting.

A studio in the midlands, a stage in Brussels

Malone's practice has, for the better part of a decade, fused fashion and sculpture. He established his label in 2014, was named a finalist for the LVMH Prize in 2016, and is associated with a generation of Irish designers — including Simone Rocha, JW Anderson, and Holly Willett — who pushed Irish textile work into international luxury showrooms during the 2010s. His signature is colour: dense, saturated, often hand-dyed cloth that behaves somewhere between garment, banner, and hanging architecture. The Brussels pieces follow that grammar at scale.

In a 9 July interview with The Guardian, Malone did not pretend the commission was apolitical. Asked about the recurring criticism that the Irish visual arts are stylistically narrow, he was blunt: "A lot of art in Ireland was made by one type of man." It is a line aimed at the canon — at the painters and sculptors whose names dominate state collections, museum hangings, and public commissions. Malone's own route to Brussels runs through fashion rather than fine art, and the installation is, in part, a way of asserting that a weaver's cloth belongs in the same rooms as a bronze or an oil sketch.

He also spoke, more lightly, about his late father — a house decorator whose wallpaper and paint jobs Malone watched as a child — and about the experience of dressing the singer Björk, whose patronage in the late 2010s gave his studio international visibility. The Björk connection is more than name-checking: her visual world treats costume as a structural element, not a finishing touch, and that logic is visible in how Malone has arranged the Brussels works. The textiles are not props to a building; the building is a frame to the textiles.

The counter-narrative: who pays, who curates

Cultural programmes attached to EU presidencies are, structurally, instruments of soft power. They are co-funded by the host government, often produced in partnership with the host's national cultural agency, and selected through curatorial processes that are less opaque than they could be. The Ireland 2026 programme has run for months under the working title of the presidency's cultural arm, with installations, concerts, and exhibitions rolling out across Brussels and Luxembourg through December.

There is a counter-narrative that the programme's critics will lean on. Ireland's visual arts sector remains underfunded relative to peer EU states. The Arts Council's annual grant-in-aid is a fraction of what Ireland's small size implies it should be, and the country still exports most of its most successful design talent to London, Paris, and New York. A six-month showcase in Brussels can be read either as a long-overdue correction — putting an Irish textile artist on a continental stage — or as a substituted national brand for the slow domestic work of building institutions that can absorb artists of Malone's scale on a permanent basis.

A second line of critique sits inside the art world itself. The contemporary European fine-art establishment, the kind that programmes the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and Skulptur Projekte Münster, has historically been slow to take textile seriously. Fabric has been read as craft, as fashion, as ethnography — anything but as a primary sculptural medium. Malone's Brussels installation is, quietly, a referendum on that hierarchy. The work is hung in the council's public spaces rather than in a museum or a fashion venue, and it is the rotating presidency of the EU that has effectively granted it the wall space, not a curator. That is a different kind of legitimacy, and it carries different obligations.

What the installation actually does to a state-visit space

The Europa building, completed in 2014, is the EU Council's main meeting place. Its central atrium is dominated by the LED-lit, low-energy "light lock" of the building's facade, designed by the Belgian studio Samyn and Partners. The space is engineered for arrivals, photo opportunities, and the controlled choreography of summits. Malone's textiles — which read, from a distance, as soft architecture — interrupt that choreography. They are loud in a building calibrated for restraint.

There is a structural reading of that choice. The EU's centre of gravity is moving, slowly, away from a Franco-German engine and toward a wider table that includes a more confident Ireland, a more sovereign Poland, a more cautious southern bloc, and an eastern flank with war on its border. The textiles in the atrium, in that sense, perform the same function the Irish presidency is trying to perform in the meeting rooms upstairs: they assert that a small member state has a visual register, not just a voting one. The clothes are, among other things, a soft version of the same argument the Taoiseach will make behind closed doors when the council negotiates the next round of budget rules.

Stakes — for Irish art, and for the presidency

For Malone personally, the commission consolidates a decade of work that began in a London fashion studio and now sits inside a building where the European Council negotiates sanctions packages. The visibility is concrete: tour groups, journalists, and heads of government will pass his work six times a day for six months. If the piece holds, it is a permanent line on a CV that fashion prizes have already started to recognise. If it does not, it becomes a cautionary tale about scale.

For the Irish cultural sector, the harder question is what follows the presidency. The standard pattern is that presidency commissions leave a residue of attention but rarely a residue of money. A textile commission is portable in a way that a building is not. The work will be packed up, catalogued, and — if the Arts Council and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media agree on a permanent home — eventually exhibited inside Ireland rather than inside the EU quarter.

The more uncertain question is whether the council's hosts will read the work at all. Diplomats tend to be incurious about art installed in their own corridors. The press corps will photograph it, briefly, on day one. The textile will, after that, become a backdrop to the real business of the building. That is the inherent gamble of any presidency art programme: the works are designed to be looked at, and the building is designed to look past them.

How Monexus framed this: the wire coverage of 9 July leaned on the pageantry — colour, scale, the Björk mention, the line about "one type of man." This piece takes the same scene and asks what an Irish textile practice is doing on a political stage that is otherwise being wired for a more contested six months of EU business.

Sources

[1] The Guardian, "'A lot of art in Ireland was made by one type of man': Richard Malone on taking his colourful fabric creations to the EU Council" — 9 July 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2026/jul/09/richard-malone-eu-council-ireland-presidency

[2] Council of the European Union, "Ireland's Presidency of the Council of the European Union" — official programme page, accessed 9 July 2026. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/ireland-presidency

[3] LVMH Prize, "2016 Finalists — Richard Malone" — LVMH official archive. https://www.lvmhprize.com/en/finalists/richard-malone

[4] Arts Council of Ireland, "Annual Report 2024: Grant-in-Aid and funding allocations" — Arts Council publication, 2025. https://www.artscouncil.ie/about/annual-report-2024

[5] European Council, "The Europa building" — Council of the EU architectural brief. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/europa-building

[6] Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media (Ireland), "Ireland's EU Presidency Cultural Programme 2026" — Government of Ireland press release, March 2026. https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-tourism-culture-arts-gaeltacht-sport-and-media/press/eu-presidency-cultural-programme-2026

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/ireland-presidency
• https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/europa-building