Eamon OKane: E-1027 + Le Cabanon
18.02.2010 - 08.04.2010
See Line Gallery Pacific Design Center 8687 Melrose Avenue, USA
See Line Gallery presents a solo exhibition E-1027 + Le Cabanon by Eamon OKane. The title for this exhibition is taken from the name of a famous house designed by Eileen Gray. Irish by birth, Eileen Gray spent the better part of her life in France, dying in 1976 at the age of 98 largely unrecognized for contribution she made to modern architecture. But in recent years new enthusiasm and interest has grown around Grays work, which included only two realized architectural projects but many studies, as well as furniture and rug designs.
In 1924 Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici began work on their vacation house, E-1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, Alpes-Maritimes, in southern France (near Monaco). L-shaped and flat- roofed with floor-to-ceiling windows and a spiral stairway to the guest room, E-1027 was both open and compact. This is considered to be Grays first major work, making indistinct the border between architecture and decoration, and highly personalized to be in accord with the lifestyle of its intended occupants. The name of the house, E-1027, is a code of Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, E standing for Eileen, 10 Jean, 2 Badovici, 7 Gray. The encoded name was Eileen Grays way of showing their relationship as lovers at the time when built.
A friend of Badovicis, Le Corbusier visited E-1027 on numerous occasions and admired it very much, so much so that he was moved to add his own touch to the clean white villa, painting a series of murals on its walls between 1937-39. This intrusion onto her design infuriated Gray, who considered the murals outright vandalism. Whether he painted these murals out of admiration for her work or jealousy of her accomplishment, Le Corbusier became intricately tied with the future of the house. Failing to purchase it himself, he eventually bought a piece of properly just east of E.1027, where he built a small, rustic cabin,Le Cabanon Here he would go for work and quiet contemplation, taking daily swims on the beach outside the house. After he died in those very waters, the whole area was declared a Site Moderne, or Modern Site, and deemed an area of cultural and historical importance and international interest. Today E-1027 is recognized as the founding element of this site.
The Pacific Design Center is an ideal location for this exhibition in that it provides a context for a reevaluation of Grays influence on subsequent generations of architects and designers. The exhibition will have the feeling of an architect/designers studio where fact and fiction collide illustrating that history is contingent and how it can be distorted. OKanes installation will involve wood and paper screens based on Grays and Le Corbusiers designs as well as a large a wall drawings of Le Cabanon and E-1027.
Eamon OKane has exhibited widely and is the recipient of many awards and scholarships including the Taylor Art Award, The Tony OMalley Award and a Fulbright Award. He has shown in exhibitions curated by Dan Cameron, Lynne Cooke, Klaus Ottman, Salah M. Hassan, Jeremy Millar, Mike Fitzpatrick, Sarah Pierce, Jeanne Greenberg-Rohatyn, Angelika Nollert, Yilmaz Dziewior and Apinan Poshyananda.In 2006 he was short- listed for the AIB Prize and received a Pollock Krasner foundation grant. OKane has had over forty solo exhibitions including shows in Berlin, Frankfurt, Dublin, Zurich, New York, London and Copenhagen. He was short-listed for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in London in 2007. His artwork is in numerous public and private collections worldwide including Deutsche Bank Burda Museum, Baden Baden, Germany Sammlung S?dhausbau, Munich Limerick City Gallery FORTIS Microsoft Bank of Ireland Collection Irish Contemporary Arts Society Country Bank, New York UNIBANK, Denmark NKT Denmark HK, Denmark Den Danske Bank, Denmark Letterkenny Institute of Technology University Of Ulster, Belfast Sammlung Winzer, Coburg, Germany British American Tobacco, Bayreuth, Germany Aspen RE, London Rugby Art Gallery and Museum Collection. Eamon completed a three-month residency at Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris in 2008. OKane will be having his first museum solo show in Germany in 2010-2011 at The Neues Museum Staatliches Museum f?r Kunst und Design in N?rnberg, Germany and also his first museum solo show in Ireland the Crawford Museum and Muncipal gallery, Cork, Ireland. In parallel to his solo show at See Line Gallery he will be having a site specific solo installation based on the architecture of Philip Johnson at 101 California in San Francisco and in a group show HAUTE.Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art. He will also be showing in a major group show in France Artists playgrounds alongside artists such as Liam Gillick, Carsten Holler, Allan Kaprow, Mike Kelley, Seth Price among others. OKane lives and works in Odense, Denmark and Co. Donegal, Ireland and is currently Visiting Research Fellow in Fine Art at UWE in Bristol, UK. |
March 2010
