Eileen O’Kane Kornreich, Pressures of Duality, 2023,
acrylic and conte crayon on canvas, 48 x 60 inches
Contributed by Chunbum Park / A man riding a lion. A canine barking at a red painting of men’s legs. Snow White eyeballing the private parts of a man holding onto a chair. A blue queer person’s reach for blankets and pillows arrayed like clouds of a night sky. “Pleasures of Duality,” Eileen O’Kane Kornreich’s solo exhibition at The Opening Gallery in Tribeca, depicts sensuous figures embracing both sides of their identity. It is an agreeably assertive and highly effective migration away from customary gender-based psychological and aesthetic orientations.
Historically, a man has been able to hold power over a woman simply by looking at her, while a woman could regain her agency by looking back. A vivid example is Édouard Manet’s Olympia, in which an apparent prostitute looks straight at the presumptively male viewer, breaking his visual grip. Things are not so simple now, with gender acknowledged to be on a spectrum. Masculine women and feminine men now express themselves in line with their desired gender roles. With powerful drawing and painting skills as a foundation, O’Kane Kornreich captures the spirit of such people in metaphorical forms and through varying degrees of abstraction.
Eileen O’Kane Kornreich, Spirit of Celluloid Watching, 2023, acrylic, pastel, colored pencil, and spray paint on canvas, 50 x 50 inches
In Spirit of Celluloid Watching, she depicts a possibly gender-fluid acquaintance. The deep blue of the subject’s skin and the redness of their eyes suggest passivity, while marks on the blue somewhat cartoonishly conjure sparking or hitting. The artist, whom I have known for several years, indicated to me that, though receptive to multiple interpretations, she is consciously alluding to Paul Gauguin’s Manao Tupapau (‘Spirit of the Dead Watching’) in this piece. Pressures of Duality depicts a hairy dog or wolf with light fur and eyes that distinctly resemble those of the artist excitedly looking at the legs of a man (or maybe a woman). The color pink, applied in predominantly vertical streaks of conte crayon, conveys the psychologically and sexually exciting nature of the situation.
Eileen O’Kane Kornreich, Princesses, 2023, watercolor, acrylic, colored pencils, pastel on canvas, 60 x 60 inches
O’Kane Kornreich’s process for painting portraits is designed to generate an extended interactive learning experience. She has the model converse with her, and the dialogue between the two enables the artist to more deeply understand and better capture the subject’s persona via iterations of improvisational drawing. The artist’s skillfully eclectic use of materials also helps transmit psychological and historical nuance. Among O’Kane Kornreich’s influences are street art and graffiti, and she combines traditional brushwork with the judicious use of spray paint and stencils. These features of her work, alongside a fearless sense of adventure, yield verve, energy, and beauty that underscores the reality, still unfathomable to many, that fluidity is no curse.
“Eileen O’Kane Kornreich: Pleasures of Duality,” The Opening Gallery, 42 Walker Street, New York, NY. Through April 14, 2024.
About the author: Chunbum Park completed their master’s thesis at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where they explored the topics of the anti-racist aesthetics and gender fluidity. Park has recently exhibited at the SVA Chelsea Gallery and in an online exhibit organized by SHIM. Park is the founder of the Emerging Whales Collective, an online community for artists.
