Artists

Jack O’Brien

Press release

London-based artist Jack O’Brien is concerned with tactile histories and their symbolic power. His large-scale installations—comprising sculpture, drawing, and painting—examine how objects are imbued with cultural significance and personal associations. O’Brien’s alteration and distortion of everyday materials speak to the way in which individuals are bound, twisted, and reshaped according to environmental pressures and societal influence. In his first solo exhibition in Italy, the sculptures appear as provisional markers; scaffolded remnants that hold their place within a larger, ongoing structure. They hover between the architectural model and the maquette, inhabiting a zone of looseness where the logic of scale and resolution remains unsettled. It is not about incompletion, but about maintaining a sense of potential. They evoke a distant echo of Renaissance sculpture, yet here the figure is absent, evacuated; what remains are vestigial folds, hardened and fixed in concrete, standing in for gestures that no longer have a body to attach to.