Helen O'Leary's (b.1961) work in painting and sculpture 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 de nition that are drawn around our formative childhood worlds. For this exhibition the artist will be building a series of 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.
Helen O'Leary was born in County Wexford, Ireland. A graduate of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Helen is currently a Professor of Art at Penn State University.
Helen has exhibited widely around the world: the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny, Ireland,
the Coleman Burke Gallery in New York, the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Stad an Zee Museum, Belgium, Glasgow Museum of Art, Scotland, the Beverly Art Centre in Chicago and the Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi, India are among the many venues to have mounted solo exhibitions of her work.
Her art has been honoured with two Pollock-Krasner awards and a Joan Mitchell Award for painting and sculpture. In 2010, Helen was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.