Details:

This painting depicts playing cards fluttering in the air, their destiny unknown. The artist's work embodies moments of interdependence, creating spaces where outcomes remain untold and viewers can dream—finding limitless potential where others feel only anxiety.
Unframed
Signed

① Artwork:

Cards in the air 12

In his latest series, Cards in the air, O’Halloran stages an art historical flirtation with Kazimir Malevich and Blinky Palermo, both of whom made works entitled Composition with Eight Red Rectangles. O’Halloran enters their conversation, with his own transformative twist – substituting the pure abstraction of the red rectangle with his signature tumbling playing cards. The paintings freeze the moment of falling, where everything is in the air and we are unsure where it will all come down. This painting situates the cards splayed and suspended across his iconic backdrop of a chiaroscuro blue evoking the recesses of deep space, sky and sea. These works flirt back to us with risk and reward as we inhabit that airborne moment, living on a teetering cusp of resolve. Here, there is something anti-human stopping at the midpoint and waiting. The twinned forces of representation and abstraction live in dialogical dance suspended within their precise square frame.

Specs:

20 inches
20 inches

③ Artist:

Luke O'Halloran

Luke O’Halloran’s paintings construct a mythology and iconography of chance, suspense, and desire where the viewer inhabits a frozen slice of imagistic possibility – of cards fluttering in the air, of forever spinning slot machine wheels, of the magician’s reveal of a bunny pulled out of a hat. From an immaculate depiction of a friend building a house of cards to semi-abstracted fluttering rectangles, O’Halloran performs a sleight of hand by capturing the illusory moment that teases the blurred edge between dream and reality, total fallout and perfect alignment, the everyday and the exceptional. His work affords risk and the unknown, a space of beauty and ecstasy where the viewer dwells in transformative moments of "what if".

BIO:

Luke O’Halloran was born in 1991. He received a BFA from University of Colorado Boulder. 

Dealing, a solo exhibition of O’Halloran’s work, took place at Kapp Kapp in New York City in 2020. Other exhibitions that have shown O’Halloran’s work include: Sarah Charlesworth & Luke O’Halloran, a two-person exhibition at Winterstreet Gallery in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts (2021); Salon de Peinture at Almine Rech in New York City (2021); and Ordinary Time at OCD Chinatown in New York City (2019). 

O’Halloran lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Luke O'Halloran:
Cards in the air 12, 2021
Oil on canvas
20.0 × 20.0 inches /