Fran O'Neill's Gestural Abstraction Exhibition at New York Studio School

Fran O'Neill's exhibition 'Recent Work' ran from September 4 to October 13, 2012 at the New York Studio School, located at 8 West 8th Street in New York City. The show featured gestural abstract paintings that push the vocabulary of abstract art forward, with works like 'rising' (2012) displaying horizontal orange stripes and angled gray lines on a gray ground. Another piece, 'earthly delight' (2012), is a six-foot-square canvas dominated by saturated purple with an angular clearing of yellow and green. 'mischief' (2012), also six-foot-square, uses a v-shaped structure cutting through red, gray, and black bars. O'Neill's approach combines a sense of the past with independence from it, building a new vernacular in abstraction. Her use of color, such as in 'memory down' (2011) with dark blues and blacks, creates emotional and structural effects. Karen Wilkin's catalogue essay notes O'Neill's Australian origins and the rich, saturated colors in her paintings, suggesting her foreign background influences her reinterpretation of New York's abstraction history. The exhibition demonstrates how gestural abstraction remains alive through experimentation.