membership / artist member

Mahali O'Hare

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Mahali O’Hare was born in Exeter in 1968. She completed her BA at the University of the West of England in 1993 and has participated in group exhibitions both in the UK, Eire and Germany. O'Hare was shortlisted for the Artsway Open 2008 and shown in Birdland, An Artists Imaginary Aviary at Salisbury Art Centre 2009.

In 2007 she was the first recipient of the Rootstein Hopkins Award which commissioned a solo exhibition, Kindling Wood, at Spike Island, Bristol accompanied by her first publication. She has been included in ARTfutures on numerous occasions by the Contemporary Art Society (2002 -2007) and has been represented at Zoo both in 2005 and 2007, by Lot and Room.

Each work emerges from photography, sometimes staged but more often the dog-eared photograph and the mundane moment.

The process of elimination and editing become the journey of possibility for many of the painting's. Iconic characters such as Mickey are reinvested with a shadowy glamour whilst the birds in Guide to British Birds become a simplified index of nature, occupying an exuberant and almost toxic yellow wash.

Images seem to have been painted somewhere beneath the surface and depict a certain way by which we may remember things, distant yet intimate.

"O'Hare's paintings have a dual quality of transparency - a plain visibility of method and medium, as well as that more transient property of phantoms and photography." - Extract from an essay by Marcia Farquhar

http://www.cavanacorgallery.ie/m_o_hare.html

• ARTfutures 2007

  7th March — 12th March 2007
  Bloomberg Space 50 Finsbury Square London EC2A 1HD

• ARTfutures 2005

  23rd November — 27th November 2005
  Bloomberg Space 50 Finsbury Square London EC2A 1HD