Meet the Artist: Helen O'Leary

A word from the artist herself, on the exhibition 'The Shelf Life of Facts' in our Upper Gallery.
themaclive.com/shows/helen-ol...
Helen O’Leary: The Shelf Life of Facts
5 Feb 2016 - 24 Apr 2016
This exhibition takes the form of a new site-specific commission for our Upper Gallery by New York-based artist Helen O’Leary.
O’Leary’s work in painting draws on her Irish background, and explores with deftness, rigor and craft, the idea of origin, of how everything we subsequently become has been framed by the visual, cultural, moral and emotional lines of definition that are drawn around our formative childhood worlds.
Contained within the gallery space is a series of large scale “history” paintings made from thwarted joinery, armatures, insets and shelves that both display all of their components and continually rebuild and reframe their own structure and meaning. The artist’s painterly explorations are located between moments of material and emotional certainty. They both laugh at and question the structural prosthesis of conventions that are established through economic, cultural and gender constraints. This new work concerns itself with the uncertainty present in any economic downturn or change, between youth and middle age, and in the rupture between external and internal life.

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This is inspiring & gorgeous! I also love that she specifically wanted to find a way to make paintings larger than Kiefer's.