membership / artist member

Eamon O'Kane

http://www.eamonokane.com
download cv here

biography

O'Kane lives and works in Odense, Denmark and Co. Donegal, Ireland and is currently Visiting Research Fellow in Fine Art at UWE in Bristol, UK.

Eamon O'Kane has exhibited widely and is the recipient of many awards and scholarships including the Taylor Art Award, The Tony O'Malley Award and a Fulbright Award. In 2006 he was short-listed for the AIB Prize and received a Pollock Krasner foundation grant. O'Kane has had over forty solo exhibitions including shows in Berlin, Frankfurt, Dublin, Zurich, New York, London and Copenhagen. He was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in London in 2007.

His artwork is in numerous public and private collections worldwide including Deutsche Bank; Burda Museum, Baden Baden, Germany; Sammlung Südhausbau, Munich; Limerick City Gallery; FORTIS; Microsoft; Bank of Ireland Collection; Irish Contemporary Arts Society; Country Bank, New York; P.M.P.A. and Guardian Insurance; UNIBANK, Denmark; NKT Denmark; HK, Denmark; Den Danske Bank, Denmark; Letterkenny Institute of Technology; University Of Ulster, Belfast; Aspen, London; Rugby Art Gallery and Museum Collection.

Eamon completed a three month residency at Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris in 2008.

statement

Eamon O'Kane's recent work might be described as "half history, half something else". A whirlwind series of exhibitions called Case Histories has already been to Rugby, Berlin, New York and London, and now touches down in two Bristol locations.

O'Kane informs us that in 1689 King James II had a meal under a sycamore tree in what is now the garden of the artist's parents. At Plan 9 Gallery, design history and personal mythology are deliberately confused, as the artist transforms the space into a workshop for recreating a set of replica chairs so that the meal can be restaged. At the quayside meanwhile there's O'Kane's Container Studio – a shipping container in which the artist exhibits drawings of Bristol's town planning history unfaithfully remixed with Le Corbusier's plans for Paris. The result is a vision for an unrealised Bristolian utopia.

- Laura McLean-Ferris, guardian.co.uk, 16 January 2009