Lucienne O’Mara
As It Stands
Brussels
January 16 – February 21, 2026
Repetition is central to Lucienne O’Mara’s practice. Her loosely rendered architectonic grids may vary in color, and rectangles are softly introduced in place of squares, but each unique work is immediately recognizable. This structure provides a solid framework she can rely on, ensuring that even the slightest shifts carry deep meaning. The self-imposed boundaries and rules allow viewers to learn the language of her work, while offering the artist a stable foundation to explore subject, color, and form in profound depth, an approach she shares with Giorgio Morandi, the Italian master renowned for his meditative still lifes of bottles, jars, boxes, and vases, rendered with extreme restraint and sensitivity.
O’Mara’s profound admiration for Morandi’s work stems from a life-altering car accident in 2017. The accident caused a brain injury that profoundly disrupted her relationship with vision, leaving her without spatial awareness or the ability to process visual information. Simple tasks, like recognizing objects or perceiving depth in a room, became impossible. During long periods of bed rest that followed, O’Mara began meticulously cataloging images of artworks, particularly drawn to Morandi’s still lifes, where objects both assert and dissolve their boundaries to create subtle depth. Through this systematic study, she gradually reconstructed her visual understanding, realizing that perception is as much a function of the brain as of the eyes: every new visual experience is inherently shaped by the images that preceded it.
The interplay of proximity, balance, rhythm, scale, light, and spatial tension so evident in Morandi’s paintings has seeped into O’Mara’s oeuvre and continues to drive her practice. Each artwork builds on the one before it: experience accumulates, influencing her color choices and technique. While earlier works, such as those in her 2024 exhibition Eternity In An Hour at our Tribeca gallery, were grounded in primary and vibrant colors, the paintings in As It Stands shift toward nuanced industrial hues—browns, beiges, chromatic grays, and blues. The highly saturated, visually bold palettes of the past have given way to subtler tones that demand more time to absorb, evoking a deeply contemplative atmosphere.
The colors in O’Mara’s paintings emerge from multiple layers of paint, where visible hues are shaped by invisible underlayers. Her wet-on-wet technique allows her to explore the interplay of light, mid, and dark tones, as translucent layers intermingle and dissolve. This method creates a pervasive sense of fluidity that illuminates the radically feminine dimension of her work. For O’Mara, fluidity embraces dualities, uncertainty and vulnerabilit, while reflecting deeply on human and feminine experiences of life. As feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray has argued, fluidity challenges the singular, unified model of patriarchy. Its dispersed and multiple nature, continuous, compressible, dilatable, and viscous, opposes linear, rigid patriarchal thinking, centering relationality and reciprocity in a feminist reclamation of the fluid against bounded, patriarchal structures.
Grids have long fascinated artists across history, from Stanley Whitney’s vibrant color fields and Piet Mondrian’s rigid compositions to McArthur Binion’s intricate mazes and Agnes Martin’s serene monochromes. Yet for O’Mara, her paintings unlock the grid’s inherent linearity. Her freehand geometry seeks to discipline the emotion and movement introduced by color and the physicality of brushwork, evoking echoes of Sean Scully or Kandinsky’s color studies with concentric forms. O’Mara transcends the grid’s natural flatness, drawing viewers into the forms or, conversely, pushing them outward.
The dialectic between the rigidity of her self-imposed grid and the expressive, fluid brushmarks forms the striking dichotomy at the heart of O’Mara’s work. Chaos and order collide in an ongoing struggle, mirroring daily life where nothing is perfectly separated and boundaries, like emotions, blend and blur.
O’Mara’s grids thus serve as a mediating force, a space where she tests composition and color on a continual journey. As Agnes Martin once observed: “Composition is a mystery dictated by the mind. Compositions arouse certain feelings of appreciation in the observer. Some appeal, some won’t.” For O’Mara, the essence of her compositions lies in providing a framework for understanding how we process visual information, and how it is always shaped by our perspectives, past experiences, and inner thoughts.
Lucienne O’Mara (b. 1989, lives and works in London, UK) studied at London Art School, London, UK. O’Mara has had solo exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery, New York, NY, US and Brussels, BE; Vigo Gallery, London, UK; Gillian Jason Gallery, London, UK; Flowers Gallery, London, UK and OHSH Projects, London, UK. Recent group exhibitions were held at Flowers Gallery, London, UK; Xxijra Hii Gallery, London, UK; Haricot Gallery, London, UK and Somers Gallery, London, UK. She has been the recipient of the Painter Stainer’s Prize, the Tony Carter Award, and a finalist of the Ingram Prize.