Extra Alphabets | Mairead O’hEocha at The Model

Event Details

Mairead O’hEocha; Extra Alphabets
Sat. 5 Jul. – Sat. 20 Sep. 2025
Curated by Michael Hill

Mairead O’hEocha’s recent paintings cast an array of extraordinary and everyday tabletop scenes that float in and out from the facts and furnishings of their surrounds: birds invade a garden lunch, an octopus coils its tentacles in a trophy room, a fake loaf of bread sits solemnly at the tenement museum; a blizzard is observed from the comfort of a home workspace.

O’hEocha’s paintings consolidate a variety of recurring themes: how to depict ‘the natural world’ and our relationship with it, sensory encounters and digital space. Extra Alphabets is the largest gathering of O’hEocha’s work in an exhibition to date. The focus is on a group of new large-scale oil paintings, with a number of unseen works, plus a selection from international exhibitions, adding to this overview of the artist’s practice. The exhibition also includes painted interventions that charge the gallery’s walls, bringing O’hEocha’s work into close conversation with The Model’s unique architecture. These painted elements play with the perimeters of the exhibition space, so the cabinets, windows, animals, glass objects, tables and their horizon lines – O’hEocha’s register of motifs – expand, absorb and reflect her approach to painting, and its forms of display.\

Artist Talk
Sat. 5 Jul. 3pm

At the opening of the exhibition Ben Eastham will talk to Mairead O’hEocha about her work.

Ben Eastham is a writer and editor based in Rome and London. He is editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism and co-founder of The White Review. His second book, The Imaginary Museum, was published in September 2020; his debut novel, The Floating World, is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions.