Into The Woods: The Ideal Studio and The Ideal Collection: Galerie Andres Thalmann, Paris, France
Galerie Andres Thalmann, Paris, presents Into the Woods: The Ideal Studio and The Ideal Collection, a new exhibition by Irish artist Eamon O’Kane. Bringing together painting, drawing and printmaking, the exhibition explores the relationship between trees, architecture, artistic practice and cultural memory, with a particular focus on the enduring legacy of Irish-born architect and designer Eileen Gray.
For O’Kane, the tree becomes both subject and metaphor: a living structure with roots, branches, histories and networks of connection. His new body of work is rooted in trees encountered in Paris and the south of France, particularly those surrounding Gray’s houses and architectural projects. New large-scale paintings and drawings, alongside a series of tree prints, translate these landscapes into a visual language that moves between observation, abstraction and memory.
The exhibition also introduces a new series of small paintings based on Eileen Gray’s architecture and design. These works focus particularly on Gray’s Paris gallery and shop, Jean Désert, which operated at 217 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré from 1922 and became an important site for the presentation and exchange of modern design. Remarkably, Jean Désert was located on the same street as Galerie Andres Thalmann. Through these geographical and historical proximities, O’Kane considers Paris as a network of meeting places in which modernism was formed through encounters between disciplines and individuals.
O’Kane’s paintings and installations use these connections not simply to reconstruct the past, but to consider how ideas move between people, places and generations. Gray’s interest in abstraction, interiority, material, proportion and the human scale becomes a point of departure for a wider investigation into the studio as a site of experimentation, exchange and cultural transmission. For more than two decades, O’Kane has investigated artists’ studios and houses as spaces where memory, creativity and social relationships intersect. Rather than treating the artist’s studio simply as a place of production, O’Kane approaches it as a psychological and cultural space: a place in which ideas are accumulated, transformed and passed on.
Alongside the new Gray works, O’Kane will present works from An Ideal Collection, an ongoing series begun in 2005. The series takes the form of an imagined collection of paintings and objects, exploring the relationship between collecting and remembering. The Ideal Collection includes references to Irish artists and to the connections between Irish modernism and wider European movements.
The exhibition’s title, Into the Woods, therefore, operates on several levels. It evokes the physical presence of trees within O’Kane’s paintings and prints, but also suggests entering a complex network of histories, references and relationships. The woods become an archive: a place where individual forms branch into larger systems of memory and where apparently separate histories become connected. The exhibition questions how we construct cultural memory, how artists inherit from one another, and how places continue to shape artistic imagination long after the people who occupied them have gone.
The project is supported by Culture Ireland and contributes to the cultural programme surrounding Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union, celebrating Irish creativity and cultural exchange within a European context.
Eamon O’Kane lives and works between Norway and Denmark. His practice encompasses painting, drawing, installation, animation, sculpture and architectural models. O’Kane’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden. His works are held in numerous prominent public and private collections worldwide.
For further information please contact:
Chase Doolan: Doolan@andresthalmann.com
