The 16th edition of the Dallas Art Fair just opened to characteristically enthusiastic and fashionable crowds, inaugurating Dallas Art Month alongside a Patrick Martinez survey at the Dallas Contemporary, and the second edition of the Dallas Invitational. This year’s 91 international exhibitors hail from America and abroad, anchored by the requisite heavy contingent from New York. Back for another year at its iconic Fashion Industry Gallery home, the Dallas Art Fair notoriously winds around a substantial first floor, with more intimate booths lining its second. Bowery-based Cristin Tierney Gallery marks their fair debut with a new body of work by Long Island-based painter Maureen O’Leary, her first time in the city, on the event’s first floor.
Since her first exhibitions in Paris and Washington, D.C. 35 years ago, O’Leary’s place-based painting practice has cataloged her snap impressions of in-between scenes through loose, vivid artworks inspired equally by Fauvist artists like Paul Ganguin and American abstractionists such as Stanley Whitney. O’Leary’s last exhibition at Cristin Tierney trained her perspective on the dualities of her lush Long Island hometown alongside her late mother-in-law’s locale of Los Angeles and Luqillo, Puerto Rico, where the artist has spent an ample amount of time painting.
O’Leary’s solo booth at the Dallas Art Fair debuts a new body of work entirely produced during her six-week residency at the American Academy in Rome at the end of 2022. Janiculum Hill depicts the lively scene from her airy studio window, with an exaggerated perspective emphasizing the hill’s steep vertigo. A bird splays violet-tinged wings that match the habits on nuns strolling through the afternoon in the background. O’Leary brought dozens of canvases with her—and a staunch conviction that she’d finish all of them. The artist spent the latter portion of each day there exploring, gathering long glances and sketches of iconic scenery from the Spanish Steps to the Tiber, which demarcates Rome’s dense neighborhood of Trastevere.
