SUBSET

SUBSET is a Dublin collective of artists, designers and filmmakers whose members stay anonymous, on the principle that the work should hold the attention rather than the people behind it. It drew wider notice in 2018 with Grey Area, a campaign built out of its running dispute with Dublin City Council, which held that its murals required planning permission and had several of them removed. Its best-known pieces are large-scale photorealistic murals: Horseboy in Smithfield, saved by a petition signed by more than 5,000 people, and a portrait of David Attenborough painted in Portobello for his 93rd birthday. In 2019 its Climate project addressed microplastic pollution in three parts: a mural for the Crush Walls festival in Denver, the Micro vs Macro exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy, and Climate III, a fish trapped in a plastic bag painted on the Temple Bar electrical substation, the largest mural it has made in Ireland.