The Studio Museum: Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin
Former Senior Curator of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Catherine Marshall describes his oeuvre 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.”
Hillsboro Fine Art is pleased to announce Studio Museum, a new solo exhibition by acclaimed Irish artist Eamon O’Kane. On view from 5 to 28 February 2026, the exhibition features new paintings from O’Kane’s ongoing Ideal Collection series alongside works created in response to residencies and visits at iconic studios and homes of major artists and architects, including Per Kirkeby’s studio on the Danish island of Læsø, Edvard Munch’s Ekely in Oslo, Claude Monet’s gardens at Giverny, Eileen Gray’s E-1027, Francis Bacon’s Reece Mews studio, and the Goulding House by Scott Tallon Walker.
In Studio Museum, O’Kane continues his exploration of creative spaces as living archives—repositories not only of artistic production but also of memory, legacy, and myth. Drawing on his distinctive blend of Modernist aesthetics, architectural precision, and painterly intuition, O’Kane reconstructs and reimagines these legendary sites as spaces of both reflection and invention. Each work acts as a portal into the environments that shaped some of the most influential figures of modern and contemporary art and design.
The exhibition marks a significant evolution of the Ideal Studio series, in which O’Kane examines the utopian ambitions and contradictions of Modernism by painting imagined museum interiors filled with artworks, objects, and furniture. In Studio Museum, the idealised museum expands to include the artist’s studio itself, foregrounding the relationship between art-making, place, and personal history.
These new works—layered with references to design, memory, and ecology—also reflect O’Kane’s broader concerns with temporality, care, and the human relationship to nature. His time in Kirkeby’s forest studio and the gardens of Giverny inform a deepened engagement with organic forms and seasonal cycles, while the intimacy of Bacon’s chaotic studio or the geometric serenity of Gray’s Riviera villa offers contrasting meditations on creative solitude.
Eamon O’Kane is Professor of Visual Art at the Art Academy in Bergen and was a guest professor in charge of the MFA in painting (2024-2025) at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. His work has been widely exhibited throughout Europe and North America and is held in numerous public and private collections. Studio Museum is his first solo exhibition at Hillsboro Fine Art.
For further information, images, or to arrange interviews, please contact:
Hillsboro Fine Art
Tel: +353 (0)1 8788242
Email: info@hillsborofineart.com
www.hillsborofineart.com
