Helen O'Leary
Helen O’Leary’s work delves into her own history as a painter, rooting in the ruins and failures of her studio for both subject matter and raw material. She disassembles the wooden structures of previous paintings—the stretchers, panels, and frames—and cuts them back to rudimentary hand-built slabs of wood, glued and patched together, their history of being stapled, splashed with bits of paint, and stapled again to linen clearly evident. The residual marks on the frames, coupled with their internal organization, begin to form a constellation of densities, implying an idiomatic syntax of organic fluctuation where compact spaces coexist with the appearance of gaping holes where the rickety bridges have given way. Formal and structural concerns become inseparable, the slippery organization of their fluctuating grids showing a transparency both literal and historical. What long remained hidden as merely the bones behind the image plane are exhumed and remade into the tendons and sinews of the image itself. Through the process of deconstruction and reassembly, the pieces invert the conventional anatomical hierarchies of painting in an attempt to find what is fresh and vital among the entrails of the image.
Among the venues that have mounted solo exhibitions of O'Leary's work are …
Helen O’Leary’s work delves into her own history as a painter, rooting in the ruins and failures of her studio for both subject matter and raw material. She disassembles the wooden structures of previous paintings—the stretchers, panels, and frames—and cuts them back to rudimentary hand-built slabs of wood, glued and patched together, their history of being stapled, splashed with bits of paint, and stapled again to linen clearly evident. The residual marks on the frames, coupled with their internal organization, begin to form a constellation of densities, implying an idiomatic syntax of organic fluctuation where compact spaces coexist with the appearance of gaping holes where the rickety bridges have given way. Formal and structural concerns become inseparable, the slippery organization of their fluctuating grids showing a transparency both literal and historical. What long remained hidden as merely the bones behind the image plane are exhumed and remade into the tendons and sinews of the image itself. Through the process of deconstruction and reassembly, the pieces invert the conventional anatomical hierarchies of painting in an attempt to find what is fresh and vital among the entrails of the image.
Among the venues that have mounted solo exhibitions of O'Leary's work are Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Michael Gold Gallery in New York, Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Beverly Art Centre in Chicago, Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi, and Catherine Hammond Gallery in Cork. She has participated in group exhibitions at institutions such as the National Gallery of Art in Limerick, the Glasgow Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Arts Centre in Sydney. O’Leary’s art has been honored with two Pollock-Krasner awards, a Joan Mitchell Award for Painting and Sculpture, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Courtesy of Lesley Heller Workspace
