MM Fine Art is pleased to present SHIFTS, an exhibition exploring the creative journeys of two contemporary artists, IRINA ALIMANESTIANU and BRIAN O’LEARY. Both O’Leary and Alimanestianu have followed similar paths in their work journeying from figurative painting to abstraction and back again. The exhibition will include pieces dating from the 1990s through today and highlight the various style and perspective transitions in their work throughout the years.
O’Leary has described the painting process as “waiting for something to happen that I wouldn’t have thought of making.” After graduating from SVA in 1982, O’Leary began his career creating detailed realist works on paper with colored pencil. Though successful with these, he felt a sense of stagnancy and in a fit of artistic frustration one night, doused the works in high gloss black paint completely obliterating them. Rather than seeing them as ruined and discarding them, he found the process freeing and discovered he was able to begin to paint without constraint.
O’Leary still continues with that process today. A dynamic painter, he rotates the canvas throughout the painting process to ensure there is no horizon line, no sense of gravity, no landscape. Manipulating tar and oil paint, he creates texture, color, and gestural marks to achieve his effects, but always with a destructive element. The paintings read as abstractions, and yet in recent work there is the subtle encroachment of figuration. The results are richly layered paintings full of energy and expression.
Irina Alimanestianu was born to Romanian parents who fled Soviet Communism and was raised in New York, Switzerland, and France. As a first generation American this instilled in her a keen awareness of our collective world history and our shared human condition. Her explorations of societal structures are reflected in her work from the early 2000s yet remain impactful on her current creative process. Her paintings in the upcoming exhibition span from when Alimanestianu was focused on social constructs and trying to understand the world and her relationship to it – to today when she explores biomorphic forms and partial depictions of humans and animals. Irina senses nature and evolution as a spiritual process, examining the invisible relationships between objects, entities, and their environment. She renders through color and shape subtle associations; connections are distilled into energy forming and dissolving, manifested through the language of abstraction.
SHIFTS will be on view October 8 to 30, 2022, with an opening reception Saturday, October 8, 6 to 8 PM. There will also be an artist talk with both artists, with moderator Paton Miller on Sunday, October 23, at 3pm.
