Maureen O’Hara Ure, “Return To Madrid,” mixed media on panel, 27 x 45 in.

Maureen O’Hara Ure’s work has long felt like a private language, built from fragments of art history, accumulated marks, and creatures that seem to emerge from some half-remembered medieval imagination. This makes her paintings immediately recognizable, and if you’ve followed her work over the years—especially her solo exhibition at Phillips Gallery in 2024—her new body of work will feel both familiar and subtly shifted. The hallmarks remain: layered mixed-media on panel, delightful drawing and mark-making, and a dense visual world. But within that continuity, the work opens outward.

The exhibition continues O’Hara Ure’s ongoing Art and Art History series, extending ideas she has developed for decades: how historical imagery can be re-seen, reworked, and repurposed into something contemporary without losing its strangeness or power. Rather than treating art history as a fixed archive, she approaches it as living material—something to quote, disrupt, and transform.

Recent travel through Spain plays a major role in the show. Over three consecutive years, O’Hara Ure gathered on-site sketches and observations, then returned to the studio and mined her notebooks as starting points for new paintings. In earlier work, travel often dissolved into fantasy: colorful landscapes, imagined architecture, and bestiary-like figures untethered to any specific geography. In this new work, the actual world pushes itself forward. Real places intrude more directly—sometimes as recognizable structures, sometimes as specific motifs, sometimes as overt quotation. The paintings don’t fully abandon her invented landscapes, but they allow the viewer to glimpse their sources more clearly, as if the sketchbooks are no longer entirely private.

Maureen O’Hara Ure, “Segovia: A Love Letter,” mixed media, 16 x 20 in.

Maureen O’Hara Ure, “Guernica,” mixed media on panel, 16 x 20 in.

That shift registers across the exhibition in degrees. In “Return to Madrid,” the surface is unmistakably hers—botanical swirls, layered marks, and an atmosphere built through accumulation—yet nothing literal anchors it to the city. By contrast, “Postcard from Granada” brings the physical world into sharper focus, quoting the Moorish city’s famous walls. In “Love Letter to Segovia,” the work moves closer still, almost like a picture-postcard scene.

Art history also comes forward in newly quotable ways. References that once felt submerged now appear more prominently, as Picasso and Velázquez enter the paintings not simply as influences but as presences. They feel like the kind of conversations that happen when you stand in front of a painting in a museum and carry it with you afterward—something to be wrestled with and made your own.

Two works stand out as greater departures. “In the Garden,” a large-scale painting, is striking in its density and energy. Its entangled mass of overlapping marks and washes evokes the all-over intensity of Pollock’s “Blue Poles.” Color accumulates, marks collide and dissolve, and as viewers step forward and become entangled in its dense layering, they can appreciate the artist’s virtuoso technique. “Knotty Pine Utah,” meanwhile, is a trompe-l’œil painting cut to the shape of the state—a playful gesture that turns image into object, and geography into outline.

Together, these works trace movement—geographical, intellectual, and personal—while revealing an artist’s practice shaped both by continuity and departure. The viewer senses an artist in conversation with her own archive: travel sketches, art historical references, prior works, and the shifting emotional weather of lived experience.

Maureen O’Hara Ure, “In The Garden,” mixed media on panel, 48 1/2 x 72 1/2 in.

Maureen O’Hara Ure, Phillips Gallery, Salt Lake City, through Feb. 13.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.