The Shape of Memory
Images
The Shape of Memory
Maria Atanacković & Tony O’Malley
1st Feb – 8th March, 2025
Opening Reception 6th Feb, 6pm, 2025
The Shape of Memory, showcases work by Maria Atanacković & Tony O’Malley created at Graphic Studio Dublin.
The exhibition brings together two distinct voices in abstraction: Tony O’Malley’s intuitive, painterly explorations and Maria Atanacković’s structured, graphic constructs. Despite differences in vision, medium and execution, a shared dialogue emerges in the ways they investigate space, memory, and emotion through abstraction.
Tony O’Malley’s lyrical carborundum pieces are deeply connected to the landscape, capturing the character and rhythm of nature. His gestural forms transcend physical representation, portraying a place not only as it is seen but as it is felt and remembered—an essence that goes beyond the visible.
Maria Atanacković’s screen prints deconstruct space into bold, geometric compositions. Through the interplay of colour, shape, and structure, she explores themes of balance, tension and humanity’s tendency to seek patterns and order. While rooted in precision and clarity, her work also reflects a search for balance within abstraction.
Together, their work creates a conversation between fluidity and formality, intuition and construction, the organic and the structured. The juxtaposition of O’Malley’s painterly lyricism and Atanackovic’s graphic boldness explore the spectrum of abstraction—not as a singular practice, but as a dynamic and expansive language.
’At its core, this exhibition is an exploration of how abstraction transcends medium and style, offering a bridge between the personal and the universal, the tangible and the intangible. Whether through O’Malley’s emotional resonance or my constructs, the works collectively prompt reflection on how we inhabit, interpret, and shape the spaces around us.’ – Artist, Maria Atanacković
Maria Atanacković b.1980 is a multi-award-winning visual artist and printmaker based in Dublin. A graduate of the University of the Arts, London, her work explores themes of belonging, connection, and balance through bold geometric compositions and playful visual language. Maria creates abstract worlds that investigate the interplay between precision and intuition, object and space. A member of Graphic Studio Dublin and BKB Visual Art Studio, she has received funding from the Arts Council and Fingal Arts Office and was awarded the DCCI Future Makers Award in 2024.
Tony O’Malley 1913-2003, is celebrated as one of the major figures in Irish 20th Century Art. He was born in Co Kilkenny and worked as a bank clerk before becoming a full-time artist, from the age of 35. Self-taught, he moved to St. Ives in Cornwall in 1960, where he came into contact with many of the leading artists in the community, including Terry Frost, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Bernard Lynch and Bryan Wynter. In 1973 O’Malley married Canadian artist Jane Harris. Through the mid-70s they regularly visited the Bahamas, Lanzarote, and The Isles of Scilly, that inspired an infusion of vibrant colour in his work. In 1990 Tony O’Malley and his wife Jane O’Malley moved back to Ireland. In 1993 Tony O’Malley was elected a Saoi of Aosdána. His works are represented in the most significant Irish public and private collections, and in important international collections of Irish art.
O’Malley was remarkably open and eager to experiment with various forms of expression in different media. He created a large body of original prints at Graphic Studio Dublin over many years through the studio’s visiting artist programme. His most chosen mode of expression at Graphic Studio being carborundum – a printmaking method often favoured by painters, that is capable of capturing painterly gestural movement, texture and brush strokes.
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