Born 1962 in Bronxville, New York. Lives in New York City.
(she/her/hers)
Erin O’Keefe is a visual artist and an architect. Her work explores both the specific properties of photography and many of the material and theoretical concerns of architecture. She is in conversation with a lineage of photographers from Florence Henri and others in the early 20th century to Barbara Kasten, who started exhibiting in the early 1970s, to contemporaries who are also examining photography on an elemental level specific to the digital age.
Erin O’Keefe (b. 1962, Bronxville, NY) lives in New York City. O’Keefe received a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Cornell University. The artist’s work has been exhibited in the U.S. and internationally at Wave Hill (New York), The Photographer’s Gallery (London), Seventeen Gallery (London), The Wing (Washington D.C.), Albada Jelgersma Gallery (Amsterdam), Kasmin Gallery (New York), Providence College Galleries (Rhode Island), and Sandra Gering Inc. (New York), among others. O’Keefe was awarded the 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Photography. O’Keefe’s work has been reviewed or featured in Artforum, The Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Vogue, VICE Magazine, and Paper Journal. O’Keefe’s work is in museum collections including the Mead Art Museum (Amherst, MA), Museum Voorlinden (The Netherlands), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
We are pleased to share that the Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, Netherlands has acquired Flat Green (2020) by Erin O’Keefe.
“I’m interested in finding/discovering/choreographing moments of uncertainty that exist in the image, but not in the ‘real’ spatial condition,” says Erin O’Keefe, erstwhile architecture professor turned full-time photographer of vision-confounding images. “You are left with just the image and its wrongness—you can never backtrack to compare, although the question of how it was made is still present.”
Erin O’Keefe featured in the Winter Issue of the Paris Review! Check out the portfolio along with an essay by Kate Tarker.
Erin O’Keefe is no stranger to It’s Nice That. She first graced our screens in 2014 and again in 2015 – like magpies we were instantly drawn to the bright colours and structural geometry that features throughout her work. And now she returns with her latest series, Built Work.
In the spaces between them, she creates worlds of color and ponders the nature of spatial perception, as three-dimensional objects are flattened into paintings or photographs.
The concept is twofold, providing a platform for underrepresented and emerging female artists, and exposing members to new and inspiring works that might just end up on their own walls at home.
When I first walked into the gallery, I mistook Erin O’Keefe’s photographs for smooth-surfaced paintings, with an intense but exquisitely tuned palette and dynamic abstract compositions.
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It is this sense of quandary, in combination with the artist’s mastery of technical and formal principles—her ability to extract such a remarkable concinnity from the collapse of painterly, sculptural, and photographic effects—that makes these works so exceptional.
What distinguishes O’Keefe’s work is her unusual approach to interrogating abstraction.
Picking up in the tradition of still life photographers such as Barbara Kasten and Jan Groover, as well as sculptors like Brancusi and David Smith who used photography to explore the perspectival limitations of their own work, Erin O’Keefe makes pictures that reinvent physical space.
I make work as a way of asking questions about how we see, and particularly how we perceive space. My background in architecture is essential to this, and makes those questions feel both more urgent and more pervasive. I remember in kindergarten, being asked what I wanted to be, and answering “artist.”
Read on Musee Magazine. April 23, 2016 (NOT SO) STILL LIFE AT WAVE HILL (Not So) Still Life presents novel ways that contemporary artists are transforming the still life genre to engage with current culture. As a subject, the still life gained popularity in the Early Renaissance as an alternative to landscape, portraiture or religious subjects. Compositions of natural and inanimate objects were often presented with allegorical connotations. Today, artists are creating new variations by working in photography and sculpture…Read More
The Flatness A Conversation with American Photographer Erin O’Keefe By Hudson Brown, February Issue Erin O’Keefe is an American photographer who has beautifully translated her two decades experience as an architect into her image making. View article HERE.
Read in The New Yorker. Printed in the October 5, 2015 Issue. ERIN O’KEEFE September 9, 2015 – October 10, 2015 Photographs of geometric arrangements of painted boards and tinted Plexiglas will inevitably draw comparisons to Barbara Kasten’s influential oeuvre. O’Keefe, a New York artist and architect, nods to Kasten (and to Eileen Quinlan and Sara VanDerBeek) but stakes her own claim to the territory—call it Bauhaus playhouse—in a series of seductively simple color images. Using reflected light and overlapping colors,…Read More
Read on Style No Chaser. HOLY SHIT! Erin O’Keefe at Denny Gallery By Efrem Zelony-Mindell, October 4, 2015 Leaving Erin O’Keefe’s studio, facing a long train ride home, I opened my issue of Art In America. Two pages in and wait – what am I doing? I want to start writing about O’Keefe! Her light and color drive a hunger inside, and to feast on her elaborate constructions reward. Establishing depth, and weight for a two dimensional surface is no…Read More
Watch on Gorky’s Granddaughter Erin O’Keefe at Denny Gallery, Sept 2015 By Zachary Keeting, Posted on September 25, 2015
Read on Collector Daily. Erin O’Keefe, Things as They Are @Denny By Loring Knoblauch, September 15, 2015 JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the two room gallery space. All of the works are archival pigment prints mounted on museum board or Sintra, and were made in 2015. The ten prints in the main gallery (from the Things As They Are series) are each sized 20×16,…Read More
Read on PDN Erin O’Keefe: Perspective, Light, Color September 9, 2015 Photographer Erin O’Keefe is fascinated by the way the camera “translates a three-dimensional subject into two-dimensional image.” A licensed architect who made sculptures before she devoted herself to photography about five years ago, O’Keefe composes the elements in her still lifes in a way that confuses perspective. Images in her newest series, “Things as They Are,” opening tonight at Denny Gallery in New York, are elegantly simple: They are…Read More
Read on Paper Journal Studio Visit: Erin O’Keefe Interview by Matthew Leifheit, Published September 9, 2015 Erin O’Keefe is a studio artist who has taken 800 pictures of a corner in her studio since last year. It’s not that she finds the corner itself particularly beautiful, it’s just a space that—when customised with very deliberate combinations of colours and materials, lit precisely, and photographed in an exacting way—can transcend its materials and become an otherworldly experience that challenges traditional perceptions…Read More
One of the prevailing (and surprisingly durable) trends out on the leading edge of contemporary photography is the ongoing exploration of photographic uncertainty, the place we end up when proof and evidence break down.
Denny Gallery presents “Frameshift,” curated by useful pictures, an artist-run investigation into the future of photographic practice. “Frameshift” focuses on the blending of classic photography and the digital world. The images are each manipulated via encoding, scanning, embedding or altering context.
Erin O’Keefe participated in Virtual—Denny Dimin Gallery’s new series of exhibitions presented exclusively online. The limited run exhibitions complement our IRL programming at the gallery and fairs with a small selections of artworks. Behind-the-scenes videos bring the immediate experience of art viewing online for a remote audience.
Eye to Eye, a Virtual Exhibition, includes three new photographs by Erin O’Keefe and will run concurrently with her exhibition Seeing Things at the New York gallery.
The three photographs, Pink Push, Threesome, and Esther, are emblematic of the artist’s current work, an ongoing series called Built Work. The video produced for the exhibition is a behind-the-scenes look into O’Keefe’s studio process, where you can watch her arrange the wooden blocks and painted boards that she sets up so precisely to create her final, two-dimensional compositions. Surrounded by her workspace and reference materials, O’Keefe speaks openly about her practice and background.
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