ARTISTS: Eamon O’Kane
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Eamon O’Kane
Irish painter Eamon O’Kane employs both meticulous quasi-realism and expressive, gelatinous abstraction in depicting half-imagined architectures. Hinting at the ghosts of their makers as much as the perceptual itinerary of their inhabitants, O’Kane’s new series fuses Modernist glass, steel, and concrete archetypes into psychologically and visually lush inversions of time, space, boundaries, and histories.
O'Kane is obsessed with modernist architecture. In his 2008 painting Lloyd Wright Dreaming he depicted the interior of a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Through its window you could see the fictional (and Wright-inspired) Vandamm house, from Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). For his current show Der Glasraum at Gregory Lind Gallery, the artist splices together the architecture of the Glass House and Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House. His work explores the dichotomy of angular avant-garde structures jutting up against nature. He also includes architectural floor plans, and captures modernist furniture like the Barcelona chair, using acrylic and coffee.
Joey Stevenson- Sep. 2010
Eamon O'Kane was born 1974 in Belfast, N. Ireland and holds a MFADT from Parsons School of Design, New York and a MFA from The University of Ulster, Belfast. O'Kane has had over forty solo exhibitions including shows in Berlin, Frankfurt, Dublin, Zurich, London and Copenhagen and New York. He has shown in numerous group exhibitions throughout Europe, in China and the United States. His artwork is in public and private collections worldwide, including Deutsche Bank; Burda Museum; Sammlung Südhausbau; Limerick City Gallery; FORTIS; Microsoft; Bank of Ireland Collection; Country Bank; Aspen RE; Rugby Art Gallery and Museum Collection. O’Kane is the recipient of many awards and scholarships, including the Taylor Art Award, The Tony O'Malley Award, Fulbright Award and a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. He has been featured in various art publications, including The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009); Beyond Architecture (Gestalten, 2009); Spacecraft 2 (Gestalten, 2009); Neue Malerei: Erwerbungen 2002 – 2005 (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005). O'Kane is Professor of Visual Art at Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway.