Mairead O’hEocha
Born in Dublin, Mairead O’hEocha, studied fine art at the National College of Art and Design before completing an MA in painting at Goldsmith’s College, University of London in 2004. On returning to Ireland, O’hEocha took a studio in Dublin’s city centre and is represented by the Irish gallery Mother’s Tankstation Limited. Over the last two decades, she has developed a distinctly conceptual practice that employs both contemporary and more traditional methods and techniques of painting.
O’hEocha manages to make paintings that are at once traditional and stridently contemporary, specific and archetypal, loaded with pathos but also inflected with an elevating glint of humour (Jonathan Griffin, 2016).
O’hEocha’s work has become highly regarded by artists, critics and collectors. She was selected to be included in the third edition of the prestigious international survey publication of contemporary painting; ‘Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting’, Phaidon (2016).
Working primarily in oil on board or canvas, O’hEocha produces a small number of works annually while also making watercolours and more recently drawings in ink on paper. She tends to work in series, focusing on sets of seemingly unremarkable and disparate cultural sources that allow her to explore form, colour, gesture and composition while reflecting on deeper aspects of human nature. Recent bodies of work include a collection of flower paintings from 2016 that acknowledge various social and cultural connotations of the genre in the history of western art.
In 2019, two works by O’hEocha were included in the NGI’s exhibition ‘Shaping Ireland’: ‘Graffiti and Railings, St Stephen’s Green Night’ (2018) and ‘Castle Ruin at Clonmacnoise’ (2011).
O’hEocha’s most recent collection focuses on the exhibits, or the stuffed animals, at Dublin’s Natural History Museum and includes paintings of various animals that would be considered exotic to an Irish audience, including bats, monkeys, mountain goats etc. These were exhibited at Temple Bar Gallery in March - July 2020 and reviewed in the July/August edition of ‘Artforum International’ art magazine by Declan Long, writing:
Such a setting - a place where natural forms are arrested and arrayed, fixed and framed for leisurely contemplation - is an apt inspiration for the orderly intricacies and time-stopping tendencies of O’hEocha’s art. Over the past decade and a half, she has finessed a wide-ranging aesthetic of complex, bittersweet stillness.
Notable exhibitions include: ‘Tale Ends & Eternal Wakes’, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 2020; ‘Slow Painting’, Hayward Gallery, 2020; ‘A Painter’s Doubt: Painting & Phenomenology’, Salzburger Kunstverein (2017); ‘Whisper Concrete’, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny (2011), The Model, Sligo (2012); ‘Via An Lár’, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2011).
