Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to participate in the 2026 edition of the ADAA Fair. Visit us in Booth C2 to see new and recent paintings by Maureen O’Leary. The fair opens with the Preview Benefit Gala on Thursday, November 12th, and continues through Monday, November 16th. This presentation coincides with O’Leary’s second solo show at the gallery, The Linden Trees, on view through Saturday, December 19th. An opening reception with the artist will be held during the inaugural Art Week NYC on Friday, November 13th, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.
O’Leary is known for paintings that uncover the surreal in everyday life. Drawing from observation, she isolates seemingly mundane moments and transforms them into psychologically charged scenes full of curious detail. Memory and imagination intermingle throughout, giving familiar places and experiences a subtly dreamlike quality.
Like the Post-Impressionists, Nabis, and Symbolists before her, O’Leary employs a fantastical palette, foreshortened or illogical perspectives, gestural brushwork, and flat fields of color. Her paintings also bring a distinctly contemporary feminist perspective to these traditions. Whereas many of her nineteenth-century forebears depicted women as symbols of nature, beauty, or desire, O’Leary presents her female figures as individuals inhabiting worlds of their own. Nature is similarly unruly: landscapes burst with flora, anthropomorphic trees, expressive clouds, and prominent fauna. In Spring (2026), a backyard gathering becomes a dense convergence of figures, animals, flowering plants, and flame, transforming an ordinary social scene into something simultaneously familiar and uncanny.
This attention to the subjective and the natural also connects O’Leary’s work to Romanticism. The artist explains, “Mundane scenes and objects—trees, homes, cars, the night, and people, mostly family—are the starting point for experimentation with the application of paint and a response to light and shadow. My subjectivity and decision-making shape choices of color, light, composition, and motif, and collectively comprise a search for the contemporary romantic.” If Romanticism emerged partly in resistance to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on objective reason and order, O’Leary’s paintings offer their own counterpoint to an increasingly digital and mediated present. This presentation insists on the pleasures of looking closely, being together, and encountering the natural world.
Maureen O'Leary's (b. 1965, Washington, DC) paintings hover between figuration and abstraction. Her mundane scenes become substrates for experimentation with the application of paint and the evolving notion of what is real. O'Leary's work has been exhibited at the Custom House in Westport, Ireland, Fondation des États-Unis, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, Art Lab Tokyo, Midwest Center for Photography, Artspace, Power Plant Gallery at Duke University, Valdosta State University Fine Arts Gallery, Staten Island Museum, Meadows Gallery - University of Texas at Tyler, and more. She is the recipient of the Brooklyn Arts Council - Brooklyn Arts Fund Grant and the Harriet Hale Woolley Fellowship from the Fondation des États-Unis.
O'Leary has published six books: The Linden Trees (2026), ROMA (2024), By The Same Sea, Homes of The Irish Diaspora (2023), Record (2021), Belle Mort (2013, Paper Chase Press) and Look/Listen (2010, Look/Listen Press). Her work has been written about in Galerie Magazine, Hyperallergic, FAD Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, and Hypebeast, among others. O’Leary’s work is held in the collections of the Fondation des États-Unis, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, and JP Morgan Chase Art Collection. She has studios in Long Island, NY, and Puerto Rico.
Founded in 2010, Cristin Tierney Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with a deep commitment to the presentation, development, and support of a roster of both established and emerging artists. Our program emphasizes artists engaged with critical theory and art history, with an emphasis on conceptual, video, and performance art. Education and audience engagement are central to our mission. Cristin Tierney Gallery is a member of the ADAA (Art Dealers Association of America).