In this exhibition O’Kane presents his ongoing series of paintings entitled An Ideal Collection for the first time in Denmark. The exhibition also includes paintings based on Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and works based on the architecture of Mies Van De Rohe, Lina Bo Bardi, Eileen Gray, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Richard Neutra.
As former Senior Curator of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Catherine Marshall states, OʼKane plays on the notions of the ideal; the ideal studio, the ideal art collection, the ideal museum in his work. The concept, for OʼKane as for Plato, the philosopher most deeply associated with it, clearly indicates the impossibility of its existence, in anything other than an imagined or spiritual sense. So OʼKaneʼs work posits an imaginary world against which to experience the real one. In a very personal way he draws together some of the icons of art history, contemporary as well as historic, that inevitably impacted on his practice and his thinking as a young artist. Coming from a generation profoundly informed by the writing of Freud and Barthes, OʼKane knows that it is impossible for any of us to acknowledge all the sources of our creativity, since many are deeply embedded in unconscious memory. He opts for open revelation instead of pretending, as so many artists have done, that they achieved what they did single-handedly.’
Eamon O’Kane (b. 1974) is a Irish artist lives and works in Denmark and Norway. Since 2011, he has been a professor of Visual Art and Painting at Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway. O’Kane’s multi-disciplinary practice has consistently been drawn to architectural contexts, whether in his Froebel Studio installation works that explore environments of play, or else in works such as Glass House that presented a scaled model of Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House which was exhibited at California 101 in San Francisco and then at his first museum solo exhibition to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sheldon Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska. O’Kane has exhibited widely in exhibitions curated by Dan Cameron, Lynne Cooke, Klaus Ottman, Salah M.Hassan, Jeremy Millar, Angelike Nollert, Yilmaz Dziewior, and others. He has been a recipient of the Taylor Art Award, the Tony O’Malley Award, a Fulbright Award, an EV+A open award (Dan Cameron), the IMMA residency in Dublin, the BSR Scholarship in Rome, the CCI residency in Paris, and a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant. He has been short-listed for the AIB Prize, the PS1 studio fellowship in New York, and the Jerwood Drawing Prize in London. He has had over 80 solo exhibitions internationally, including in New York, London, Berlin, Frankfurt, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris, Copenhagen, Oslo, Bergen, Dublin, Belfast, and Cork. He has participated in numerous biennales including EVA, Limerick, Luleå Biennal, Norwegian Sculpture Biennal, and Dublin Contemporary.
Gallery Christoffer Egelund invites you to the opening of the show Eamon O’Kane Friday, Mar. 1. 4-7 pm. The artist will be present during the opening reception. The show runs until Mar. 30.th, 2019. Opening hours: Tuesday–Friday from 11am-6pm, Saturday from 12am-4pm. For more information regarding the works and, please contact the gallery at hello@christofferegelund.dk or phone no. +45 33939200. Please visit www.christofferegelund.dk for more details.