NYAB Event - Morgan O’Hara Exhibition

Morgan O’Hara Exhibition

Tenri Cultural Institute

This event has ended.

Fou Gallery presents artist Morgan O’Hara’s solo exhibition at Tenri Cultural Institute.

Morgan O’Hara’s LIVE TRANSMISSION drawings track, in real time, the vital movement of living beings, transcending both figuration and abstraction, executing a direct neural translation from one human action into another. Drawing methodically with multiple razor-sharp pencils and both hands, as performative drawing, O’Hara condenses movement into accumulations of graphite line which combine the controlled refinement of classical drawing with the unbound sensuality of spontaneous gesture. Time-space coordinates for each drawing are described with the most unexpected precision in the titles.

Begun in 1989, this temporal-spatial-gestural archive of human activity bridging the twentieth and twenty-first centuries now numbers approximately 3,000 drawings. On occasion other signs of life are also drawn: movement of leaves on a tree, light reflections on water, of animals on a farm, movement of the incoming tide, whatever presents itself in a given moment. A selected list of LIVE TRANSMISSION subjects follows: cooks, secretaries, butchers, shoemakers, dancers, musicians, poets, politicians, architects, doctors, psychiatrists, artisans, children, athletes.

Morgan O’Hara was born in Los Angeles and raised in an international community in post-war Japan. She earned a Master’s Degree in Art from California State University at Los Angeles, and had her first solo exhibition in the Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1978. Her practice researches the vital movement of living beings through drawing. In 1989 she began doing performative drawing in international performance art festivals, did her first site specific wall drawings and began the practice of aikido, a Japanese martial art. In 1997 O’Hara’s work was honored with a solo show in the newly opened Drawing Room at the Drawing Center in New York. O’Hara lived in Europe for 25 years, and now lives in New York and works internationally. She has been a member of the Elizabeth Foundation in 2010. Her work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including: Czech National Gallery, Prague; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Macau Art Museum, Macau, China; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the British Museum, London.

[Image: Morgan O’Hara, LIVE TRANSMISSION: Movements of the hands of PIERRE BOULEZ while conducting the LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA in STRAVINSKY “PETROUCHKA” (1911 version) / Boulez’s 75th birthday concert / Carnegie Hall / New York / 13 March 2000, graphite on Bristol paper, 14 x 17 in. 2000. © 2016 Morgan O’Hara, courtesy Fou Gallery]