David O'Kane Ireland, b. 1985

Irish-born artist David O’Kane works across various mediums, including painting, drawing, photography, animation, and film. His work, predominantly figurative in nature, is characterized by a dreamlike quality rendered with a realistic approach. O’Kane captures the borderlines of perception—echoes of dreams, fragments of memories, and narratives—and transforms them into startling scenes. Using an intense color palette and expressive technique, O’Kane’s paintings challenge the static nature of their medium, with figures that seem to enact a role or movement within a broader narrative. By rearranging and displacing these figures in historical contexts and backgrounds, the artist imbues his canvases with narrative depth, while simultaneously foreclosing any clear clues as to how or why the figures arrived there, or how their stories might continue to unfold.

David O’Kane (b.1985,  Ireland) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He studied at the HGB (Academy of Visual Arts) in Leipzig for five years under Neo Rauch (b. 1960), a leading figure of the New Leipzig School (NLS), earning a Meisterschüler degree in 2012. O’Kane has won numerous awards, scholarships and residencies. In 2014, he won the Golden Fleece Award in Dublin, Ireland. He was artist in residence at the Stiftung Starke (Berlin, 2010-2013) and awarded the Derek Hill Foundation Scholarship and Residency at the British School at Rome (2009). In 2008 at the EVA Biennial in Limerick, Ireland he won the open award from the curator, Hou Hanru. His work is represented in the collections of Busan Museum of Art in Korea, the Kuntshalle der Sparkasse in Germany, the Zabludowicz Collection in the UK, the CAP Foundation in Ireland and the Trapaga-Fonalledas Collection in Puerto Rico.