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 […]
With university faculty art exhibitions, there is rarely a throughline—a main theme or narrative that ties all the disparate works by different artists together—and the UMFA’s Relative Truths, seems, at first, to be no exception. There are several stated themes—isolation, division, contested histories, cultural anxiety, dismantling of human […]
The wind was howling, but people were talking about the art, not the weather, at Maureen O’Hara Ure’s packed opening on Friday evening at Phillips, her longtime gallery, where she’s presenting the second set of mixed-media panels she began with on-site sketches while traveling through Spain in 2022 […]
Consider this familiar fact: we know that water arranges grains of sand more tightly together, so that when they dry, the sand has become solid, recalling the rock from which it was abraded. Pro sculptors, amateurs on holiday, and even children at play can carve the most remarkable […]
Author, master printer, multimedia artist and Weber State professor, Susan Makov was among the first artists to sound a warning about the plight of the natural environment, depicting things in her prints like birds beset by the trashy artifacts of human overpopulation. It fact, she arrived so early […]
I entered Phillips Gallery last week with a little shiver of anticipation: there’s a solo show by Maureen O’Hara Ure, one of the most original and interesting artists working in Utah today. And I was going to get to talk to her about it. Art, for O’Hara Ure, […]
No self-respecting dramatist would set a Biblical Apocalypse in the parking lot of a shopping center; it’s too mundane, too much a whimper and not a bang, to produce the proper sense of doom. Yet today it’s a routine event to carry the groceries out to the car, […]
The delightful and always intriguing work of Maureen O’Hara Ure, where small and mysterious creatures abound, was recently seen in the Faculty Show at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Utah where she lectures and can also be seen nicely displayed on the second […]
Painted, the artist says, during a period of immense trial and emotional pain, “A Lucky Life” is a surprisingly bright painting. In the bottom left, the bulbous and cuddly figure of a bear plays a game with a lovable cub, the frolicking figures enshrouded in patters of brilliant […]
Laura Boardman recently invited some of her fellow artists to participate in an informal experiment to find out whether women as artists differ from men, and what the differences might be. Those invited were full-time painters with BFA or MFA degrees. Experience ranged from five to twenty-five years, […]
