PARIS.- Almine Rech announced the global representation of American artist Gwen O'Neil.

The gallery is presenting her work in a group exhibition in New York. This has been followed by her first solo exhibition with the gallery in Paris, which opened on May 11, 2024.

Gwen O’Neil (b. 1992, New York, New York) currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She earned her BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2015.

O’Neil’s distinctive process consists of the artist intuitively, yet methodically, dabbing fluctuating pigments on raw canvas in a chorus of dynamic harmonies that crash, swirl, and dance across the surface. The luminous canvases draw inspiration from the natural landscapes surrounding the artist’s home in California. Through these abstracted scenes, O’Neil evokes both the cosmic and the everyday: the atmosphere of Los Angeles twilight, the spiraling geometry of shells, and the hypnotic formations of migrating starlings.

The gallery will also feature her works at The Armory Show, New York in September 2024 and at Frieze London in October 2024. A second solo exhibition in New York in 2025 will follow.

"Gwen O’Neil's work immediately captivated me when I first saw one of her paintings.

The fascinating subject of light and space is central to her work, as it is for other artists we show, but with Gwen O’Neil it is through the medium of paint. Her work is unique in the sense that she paints what might be called abstract paintings, however they are a vision of space, of the color spectrum in the sky where choreographies of murmuration occur, of wavelength of light and color…" — Almine Rech

Gwen O'Neil
'Over the Ridges and through the Passes'

Over the ridges and through the passes, Gwen O’Neil’s first exhibition with Almine Rech presents a series of new paintings inspired by unique weather and light conditions endemic to southern California. Like many West Coast-based artists, notably those associated with the Light and Space movement such as Larry Bell, Mary Corse, and Dewain Valentine, O’Neil seeks to capture the combination of natural and artificial factors responsible for southern California’s dramatic environment. Acknowledging that the fiery sunsets and hazy glow associated with Los Angeles are largely the result of air pollution, O’Neil’s paintings are as foreboding as they are dazzling.

Channeling painters like Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, O’Neil composes her compositions, typically swirls, curls and waves of intense and varied colors, out of individual daubs of paint. Placing different colors next to each other on the canvas (rather than mixing them on a palette), O’Neil creates hazy volumes that seem to pulsate as we fix on them. Up close, these abstractions, which she bases on natural forms ranging from the tiny spirals inside seashells to massive murmurations of birds, break down into individual marks, like a digital photograph disintegrating into pixels. A constant push and pull between micro and macro perspectives in O’Neil’s work keeps the viewer’s eye coming back to the surfaces of her canvas, as do seemingly errant touches of color that pop, instead of blending with the surrounding hues. Unexpected dashes of hot pink or chartreuse, for example, disrupt the illusion of distance or volume. The effect recalls similarly surprising painterly flourishes found in landscapes by Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh or even Joan Mitchell. Similar to the blazing, almost neon orange sun in Monet’s famous Impression Sunrise, 1872, certain aspects of O’Neil’s compositions seem intended to emphasize the materiality of paint itself.

In addition to light effects, O’Neil has found inspiration in natural phenomena like starling murmurations and, most recently, the Santa Ana winds. Her paintings translate the dizzying patterns created by thousands of birds flying and swooping into colorful swirling compositions that communicate a sense of awe, but also danger. Stunning though they are, starlings are an invasive species. With this in mind, O’Neil’s paintings can be understood not only as appreciations of the birds’ incredible synchronized configurations, but also as a kind of alarm bell signaling a potential threat to the ecosystem.

The works on view in Paris continue O’Neil’s exploration of California’s infamous Santa Ana winds, a likewise duplicitous marvel she has been painting since 2023. These strong winds are the bearer of beautiful clear skies and dry weather, but also have the potential to cause massive destruction. Warm, dry air creates prime conditions for forest fires, which is why Native American tribes have referred to these intense storms as devil winds. In addition wreaking havoc on the natural landscape, the Santa Anas are associated with all kinds of strange reactions in humans ranging from physical ailments, like headaches, to psychological ones, like depression and anxiety. In paintings like Canyon Vibrations and Mountain Pass (all works 2024), O’Neil captures both tangible and eerie effects of this force of nature.

As an East Coast native who grew up between New York City and East Hampton, O’Neil initially worried she might find California’s lack of seasons perturbing. Indeed, fall foliage, winter snow, spring blooms and summer heatwaves, have been replaced with wildfires, flooding, and sea-level rise. Wth an acute awareness of her immediate surroundings, O’Neil has developed an artistic practice that documents and raises questions about the effects of human caused climate change on her own backyard. Resonating well beyond, her paintings are deceptively beautiful warnings about the precarity of our planet.

— Mara Hoberman, art critic