Studio, House, Museum: Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin
In Studio House Museum, O’Kane extends his long-standing exploration of creative spaces as living archives, sites that hold not only traces of artistic labour but also memory, influence, and mythology. His paintings reconstruct and reimagine these environments through a distinctive synthesis of Modernist aesthetics, architectural clarity, and painterly intuition. Each work functions as a speculative interior or exterior, a space where art history, personal experience, and imagination intersect.
Hillsboro Fine Art is pleased to announce Studio House Museum, a new solo exhibition by acclaimed Irish artist Eamon O'Kane, on view from 5 February to 7 March 2026. The exhibition presents new paintings from O'Kane's ongoing Ideal Collection series alongside works made in response to residencies and visits to significant studios and houses associated with major artists, collectors and architects. These include Francis Bacon's Reece Mews studio and Eileen Gray's E-1027, and houses of architects and collectors such as the Edith Farnsworth House by Mies Van Der Rohe, Philip Johnson's Glass House, the Goulding SummerHouse by Scott Tallon Walker, Ronnie Tallon's house and Lina Bo Bardi's house.
In Studio House Museum, O'Kane extends his long-standing exploration of creative spaces as living archives, sites that hold not only traces of artistic labour but also memory, influence, and mythology. His paintings reconstruct and reimagine these environments through a distinctive synthesis of Modernist aesthetics, architectural clarity, and painterly intuition. Each work functions as a speculative interior or exterior, a space where art history, personal experience, and imagination intersect.
Several paintings in the exhibition explore lines of influence and artistic affinity across generations. One group of works examines the connection between Eileen Gray and Francis Bacon, drawing attention to Bacon's engagement with Gray's furniture and interior design, forms that echo through the spatial compositions of his paintings. Another work depicts Ronnie Tallon's house, recalling Tallon's role in designing a studio in the south of France for Anne Madden and Louis le Brocquy, a space Bacon visited and famously remarked that he envied. Through such works, O'Kane maps a network of creative relationships that underpin modern and contemporary art practice.
The exhibition marks a significant development of O'Kane's Ideal Studio series, in which he interrogates the utopian aspirations and inherent contradictions of Modernism through imagined studio, house and museum interiors populated by artworks, objects, and furniture. In Studio Museum, this idealised museum expands to encompass the artist's studio itself, foregrounding the intimate relationship between art-making, architecture, and personal history.
Former Senior Curator of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Catherine Marshall, has described O'Kane's practice as follows:
"O'Kane plays on the notions of the ideal; the ideal studio, the ideal art collection, the ideal museum in his work. The concept, for O'Kane 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. (…) 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 an artist. He opts for open revelation instead of pretending, as so many artists have done, that they achieved what they did single-handedly."
Across the exhibition, O'Kane's paintings are layered with references to design, memory, and ecology. He reflects on his time in Per Kirkeby's self-designed studio on the island of Læsø in Autumn 2026 where O'Kane started many of the paintings in this exhibition. He also reflects on his visit to Edvard Munch's studio at Ekely in Norway on Munch's birthday in December 2024 (O'Kane will have a residency for the month of March 2026 in Munch's Winter studio at Ekely). His visit to Monet's gardens at Giverny in spring 2025 informs a heightened sensitivity to organic forms and seasonal rhythms. The contrasting atmospheres of Bacon's chaotic workspace and Gray's measured Mediterranean modernism offer meditations on solitude, discipline, and creative intensity.
Eamon O'Kane is Professor of Visual Art at the Art Academy at the University of Bergen and was Guest Professor in charge of the MFA in Painting (2024-2025) at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. His work has been widely exhibited across Europe and North America and is held in numerous public and private collections. Studio House Museum is his first solo exhibition at Hillsboro Fine Art.
For further information, images, or interview requests, please contact:
Hillsboro Fine Art
Tel: +353 (0)1 8788242
Email: info@hillsborofineart.com
