On Eamon O'Kane
Eamon O'Kane has exhibited widely and is the recipient of many awards and scholarships including the Taylor Art Award, The Tony O'Malley Award and a Fulbright Award. He has shown in exhibitions curated by Dan Cameron, Lynne Cooke, Klaus Ottman, Salah M. Hassan, Jeremy Millar, Mike Fitzpatrick, Sarah Pierce, Jeanne Greenberg-Rohatyn, Angelika Nollert, Yilmaz Dziewior and Apinan Poshyananda. He has taken part in EV+A, Limerick, Ireland seven times including 2005 when he received an EV+A open award from Dan Cameron. In 2006 he was short-listed for the AIB Prize and received a Pollock Krasner foundation grant.

Artistic Research focus
Installation and Painting

Artistic Research Project
Eamon O'Kane's current research involves among other things the examination of the legacy of Frederich Froebel on modern society.

The result of his research mainly takes the form of interactive installations, that have been shown in exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Limerick, Quimper and Dublin Contemporary 2011, taking inspiration from artists, architects, and designers such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Charles Eames, educated in early childhood using the methods of Frederich Froebel. These highly interactive installations cross a wide range of disciplines and social structures examining Froebel's legacy whilst exploring the links between the natural world and the development of creativity.

Beginning with the historical context of the research my artworks develop the argument that within Froebel´s legacy we can locate the seedbed of modern art. Froebel designed the educational play materials known as Froebel Gifts, or Fröbel gaben, which included geometric building blocks and pattern activity blocks. With its emphasis on abstract decomposition and building up from elemental forms, the original kindergarten system of the mid-nineteenth century created an education and design revolution that profoundly affected the course of modern art and architecture, as well as physics, music, psychology and the modern mind itself.

Eamon O'Kane is currently working on a series of permanent public artworks for a dementia care home in Bristol, UK. This commission will be completed in early 2013

Social interactivity: Eamon O'Kane's installations could also be referred to as archives or "research-based-projects". They are participative in the sense that the audience can change the work by using the materials placed at their disposal. In a truly experimental way the straightforward boundaries between production and reception have become permeable.

Solo Exhibitions
"There Is Another World, But It Is In This One" at RARE Gallery, New York, USA. October 13 - November 10, 2011.
"In All Things", 126 gallery, Galway, Ireland. June 13th - July 7th, 2012.

Group Exhibitions
'School Days' Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork - 18th November 2010 - 20th March 2011.

Dublin Contemporary 2011, at Earlsfort Terrace and the Iveagh Gardens, National Gallery, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, RHA Gallery, Dublin, Ireland September 6 - October 31, 2011

"It's about Time", Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, LA, USA April 30 - June 11, 2011 www.otis.edu

"Social Structures", Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Idaho, USA.

Bibliograhy
Perfect Spaces, Angelika Nollert, 2012.

The Garden of Children, Norman Brosterman, 2012.

In all things, Eamon O'Kane, 126 Gallery June 13th - July 7th, 2012 PUBLISHED in The Visual Artists News Sheet (VAN) Issue 3 2012 Review by Áine Phillips 24th June 2012.

O'Kane has had over forty solo exhibitions including shows in Berlin, Frankfurt, Dublin, Zurich, New York, London and Copenhagen. He was short-listed for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in London in 2007. His artwork is in numerous public and private collections worldwide including Deutsche Bank; Burda Museum, Baden Baden, Germany; Sammlung Südhausbau, Munich; Limerick City Gallery; FORTIS; DUBLIN 98FM Radio Station; Microsoft; Bank of Ireland Collection; Irish Contemporary Arts Society; Country Bank, New York; Office of Public Works; P.M.P.A. and Guardian Insurance; Donegal County Library; UNIBANK, Denmark; NKT Denmark; HK, Denmark; Den Danske Bank, Denmark; Sammlung Strack, Cologne, Germany; Letterkenny Institute of Technology; University Of Ulster, Belfast; Sammlung Winzer, Coburg, Germany; British American Tobacco, Bayreuth, Germany; Aspen RE, London; Rugby Art Gallery and Museum Collection.

Eamon O'Kane has taken part in many residencies including ARP at The Irish Museum of Modern Art (2004), The Derek Hill Foundation Scholarship at the BSR in Rome (2006) and at Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris (2008).

Collections
Deutsche Bank, Germany; Burda Museum, Baden Baden, Germany; Limerick City Gallery (National Drawing Collection); FORTIS, Frankfurt; DUBLIN 98FM Radio Station; Microsoft, World Product Group Ireland; Bank of Ireland Collection; Irish Contemporary Arts Society; Country Bank, New York, USA; Office of Public Works: Department of Agriculture and the Office of the Attorney General; P.M.P.A. and Guardian Insurance; Donegal County Library; UNIBANK, Denmark; ASPEN RE, London; NKT Denmark; HK, Denmark; Den Danske Bank, Denmark; Letterkenny Institute of Technology; Dundalk Institute of Technology; Rugby Art Gallery and Museum; Waterfront Hall, Belfast City Council; Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, France.