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Leipzig International Art Programme Documentary
Broadcast July 2008, Leipzig, Germany
Please select this link to view the documentary
Utopia and other lands in Limerick (e v+ a 2008)
March 19, 2008, The Irish Times
"In an impressively well produced video, reminiscent of the work of Gerard Byrne, David O'Kane imagines a sombre wordy meeting between Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges and Flann O'Brien. Since all speak in their native tongues, a dictionary or two might be handy."
Aidan Dunne
Copyright 2008 The Irish Times
All Rights Reserved
The Irish Times
Emerging Artists
Issue 112, Frieze Art Magazine, January-February 2008
"David O’Kane’s animations have a freshness and technical expertise that reinforces their formal interests."
Issue 112 January-February 2008
Experiments with the symbolic power of nature
June 20, 2007, The Irish Times
"Magic is relevant to O'Kane's work as well, though in a more mischievous, subversive way. He is forever undercutting any notion of the real, first positing and then dispensing with apparently straight-laced representations. Like the earliest cinematographers, he relishes film's ability to cheat the mechanics of perception in his video animations. He cites Baudrillard, the cultural theorist who argued that we live increasingly in a world of simulacra, of depthless signs, remote from any imagined reality. O'Kane develops a coherent body of motifs, from the idea of a prototypical metaphysical interior to the use of paper as a symbol of knowledge, inquiry and representation. His paintings are intriguing..."
Aidan Dunne
Copyright 2007 The Irish Times
All Rights Reserved
The Irish Times
'Camera Lucida' by David O'Kane
February 27, 2006
Gallery Sign is a contemporary gallery in Groningen, which always exhibits experimental artistic expressions. Yesterday a Two-Person exhibition opened of the young artist Jordan Artisan and the younger still artist David O'Kane. Was Lewis Caroll, the writer of Alice in Wonderland, a paedophile? David O'Kane, a twenty-year-old Irish artist, posits this question. He mixes his own youthful portrait with that of the writer and plays with photograph which the writer himself made of children. He makes lenticular prints. He allows the wink of a little girl to establish his proposition. Elsewhere he elicits the impression that Carroll seduces the little girl ... He already recreated Dante's Inferno in his own backyard, with himself as 17th Century soldier. But he finds his newest work stronger. In a similar way there is indeed an absurdity to his panoramic photomontage, with the Het Loo Palace gardens as a backdrop, where dozens of little girls are caught on the paths and between the low hedges - seemingly trapped by the garden walls. Marie-Jeanne Ameln, Director of the Gallery Sign, discovered O'Kane as an Erasmus exchange student at Academy Minerva in Groningen… Sign is constantly in search of new artists. They are frequently young artists, but it is more important that it is experimental and that is certainly not tied to the artist’s age.
Door Eric Nederkoorn
Copyright 2006 Noordelijke Dagblad Combinatie / Dagblad van het Noorden
All rights reserved
O'Kane and his accomplices:
From the studio in the woods: Art and the artificial assistants of three Irish brothers at Gallery Schuster
August 2, 2003, Culture the Rhine / Main, Frankfurter Allgemeine
"Home and domesticity also provide, play a significant role for the three Irishmen, whose parental home is completely devoted to Art. In particular David – In the basement of the Gallery Eamon O’Kane presents work by his brothers, Matthew and David, who both study painting in Dublin – has delighted with soldiers in historical garments whirling around theatrical interiors, which would be suited as conceptual sketches of the Fantastic with coat and sword romanticism. The affordable, understated and besides stimulating contribution to the summit of the Irish Family are studies in black and white: unique – dry point etchings, for which David O’Kane uses plastic printing plates that only allow a single print. Above all in the young O’Kane reveals in Portraiture an astonishing art of characterization…"
Dorothee Baer-Bogenschütz
Copyright 2007 Frankfurter Allgemeine
All Rights Reserved
Frankfurter Allgemeine
