Artist: Jack O’Brien

Maureen Paley presents Leisure, the first exhibition by Jack O’Brien at the gallery in Morena di Luna, Hove.

In this new exhibition, Jack O’Brien reconfigures everyday objects through processes of twisting, binding, stretching, and puncturing, using these material interventions to probe how desire is constructed, how economies of consumption are sedimented, and how queer aesthetics operate under conditions of instability and continual transformation.

In Leisure, resin filled wine bottles recur as a motif, functioning less as a symbolic object than as a small architectural scaffold; provisional columns around which other materials lean, suspend, or gather. The title Leisure is not meant to describe ease, but more a condition that the sculptures temporarily inhabit: a framework in which disparate elements pause in relation to one another.

This logic attempts to be in dialogue with the Regency architecture of Morena di Luna. Curves and flourishes within the works echo the building's baroque detailing, while his repurposed materials – sellotape, spring cords, metal, rubber, and cellophane — introduce a contemporary vernacular, recalling the language of packaging and distribution. As objects meant to be held and consumed, the wine bottles hold a relationship to the body, adding a physical presence to the aesthetic of industrial mass production.

With special thanks to Ginny on Frederick and Freddie Powell.

Jack O’Brien (b. 1993) lives and works in London. In 2026, a monograph of his work, Cue the Cue, was published by Bierke Verlag, Berlin. Solo museum presentations of his work were presented with Cue the Cue, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany (2025) and The Reward, Camden Art Centre, London, UK (2024). He was the recipient of the 2023 Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Prize at Frieze London.

Further solo exhibitions include: A Formality, Ordet, Milan, Italy (2025); Cascade, Capitain Petzel, Berlin, Germany (2025); The Theatre and Its Double, Between Bridges, Berlin, Germany (2023); The Answer, Sans Titre Invites, Paris, France (2023); Waiting For The Sun To Kill Me, Ginny on Frederick, London, UK (2021); and This thing bled acid. White Cubicle, London, UK (2018).

Recent public group exhibitions include: Make Some Noise: Desire. Stage. Change., Vann Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2026); Air de repos (Breathwork), CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2024); Stick N Poke, Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland (2023); and Something is Burning, Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia (2022).