Courtesy of the Cristin Tierney gallery
Artist Statement:
Maureen O'Leary's paintings hover between figuration and abstraction. Her mundane scenes become substrates for experimentation with the application of paint and the evolving notion of what is real. Exploration of bright colors and a response to light and shadow are central to her practice. Moments depicted reflect and chronologize her preoccupations as would a diary and comprise a search for the contemporary romantic.
Two Poussins is part of series of paintings of raw chickens that O’Leary has developed over the last decade. O’Leary selected this painting subject because it poses the same artistic challenges as the painting of people yet introduces complex new narratives. Her life-sized, raw chickens from the grocery store show naked flesh transitioning from a living being to food, neither vital nor edible. Arms, legs, headlessness, and gouges evoke trauma and anatomical mystery contextualized within domesticity. The images initiate a conversation about shared flesh, occasional humor, and reflections on the interconnections between humans and animals.
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Maureen O’Leary is a painter who also works in photography. Her work has been exhibited at the Fondation des États-Unis, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, Art Lab Tokyo, Power Plant Gallery at Duke University, Valdosta State University Fine Arts Gallery, Staten Island Museum, and more. She is a past recipient of the Harriet Hale Woolley Fellowship in painting from the Fondation des États-Unis and has published two books of photography: Record (2021, Midwest Center for Photography) and Belle Mort (2013, Paper Chase Press). Her work is held in the collections of JP Morgan Chase, Fidelity Bank of Boston, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and has been reviewed in The Washington Post, The Brooklyn Rail and White Hot Magazine. She is a graduate of Yale College and trained at the Art Students League, New York. She is represented by the gallery Cristin Tierney, New York, New York.