Aleana Egan
Kerlin Gallery presents
Aleana Egan
at 26 Place des Vosges, 75003, Paris
With support from
For Places des Vosges 2025, Aleana Egan presents a group of new paintings and sculpture. In Egan’s work, traces of psychological states and experience are harvested and expressed through material objects, colour, and form, blending fragmented interior visions with observations from the world at large. The works are deeply personal yet not biographical.
The new paintings have a common theme of duality; each one contains its own logic that is both a communication whilst retaining its incommunicado core. The paintings are an ongoing unfinished indecipherable language that feeds into all creative practice. Starting points that include; dreamscapes, waking life; routines and rituals are subjected to the having and losing process of painting. This group contain areas of the canvas or linen that resemble tactile memories of fabric. Hinting at the transcendental nature of fabric and clothes; that evoke absence, but also the essence of a person – an external layer that can express our interiority, creating an atmosphere of emotional resonance and intimacy.
Areas of the paintings resemble unearthed old clothes; faded blue denim; worn out cotton t-shirts.
The emotional directness of clothes and fabric is carried into the wall relief sculptures. They are cast from bronze and untreated. This porous surface retains the immediacy and provisional nature of the original template made from gauze, cardboard, tape and mesh. These wall works are an attempt to make physical the intangible dynamics between people.
A meandering, sensuous line and sense of fluidity is carried from Egan’s sculptures into her painting practice. The artist manipulates colour, surface and texture, layering thin washes with thicker daubs. Inchoate forms evoke the malleable and elusive images that form behind closed eyes; fragmentary shapes that grasp at images as if retrieving memories from deep in the psychic landscape.
Aleana Egan
a maritime child, 2025
mixed media on canvas with solid American white oak and linen mount
87 x 74 x 6 cm / 34.3 x 29.1 x 2.4 in framed
Aleana Egan
living thing, 2025
untreated bronze, unique
105 x 16 x 4 cm / 41.3 x 6.3 x 1.6 in
Aleana Egan
note and tone, 2025
oil on linen with solid American white oak and linen mount
84 x 72 x 6 cm / 33.1 x 28.3 x 2.4 in framed
about the artist
Photo: Jack Caffrey
Aleana Egan
b. 1979, Dublin, Ireland
Lives and works in Dublin, Ireland
Aleana Egan’s practice is shaped by her deep engagement with works of literature and cinema: never opting for direct representation, she uses this source material as an entryway, absorbing the moods and tones it evokes. Egan engenders psychological states and memories through enigmatic arrangements of objects and forms. Her sculptural works appear restrained, but are laden with subtle references to the built environment. An airy, slender metal structure might echo an architectural form plucked out of the landscape, while her use of simple household materials – plaster, cardboard, matte paint and various fabrics – speak to the domestic. Egan's forms and shapes act as traces or shifting responses, tentative articulations of remembered places or everyday moments. A meandering, sensuous line and sense of fluidity is carried from her sculptures into her film and painting, giving form to a sense of flux, openness and mutability.
Second-hand
Lismore Castle Arts, 2024
Aleana Egan has exhibited at Sculpture Center, New York; Kunsthalle Basel; Kunsthalle zu Kiel; Landesmuseum Münster; The Drawing Room and Jerwood Space, London; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh; Leeds Art Gallery; the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Temple Bar Gallery and IMMA, Dublin, and the Berlin Biennale. Recent solo/two-person exhibitions include Material Flux, a two-person exhibition with Isabel Nolan at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda; Second-hand, Lismore Castle Arts, Co. Waterford (both 2024); Kerlin Gallery (2023); Void, Derry (2022); and Künstlerhaus Bremen (2021).
Egan's work can be found in the collections of Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; FRAC des Pays de la Loire, France; Dallas Museum of Art; LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster, Germany; The Art Council, Ireland; Park Hotel, Kenmare, Ireland; Tia Collection, Santa Fe, USA andNorac Collection, France.