Kent O'Connor

Matthew Brown is pleased to announce Flame of Vapor, a solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Los Angeles-based artist Kent O’Connor at the gallery’s New York location.

Working across the traditional painting genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life, O’Connor prioritizes deep observation and engagement, emphasizing the essential presence of artist and subject while making his work.

O’Connor’s direct portraits depict friends, family, and himself with an unguarded gaze. Each work takes shape over several prolonged live-sitting sessions with his subject. Through this extended painting process, O’Connor adjusts and refines their features, subtly distorting faces and bodies into deliberate, architectonic forms. The result bears a psychological intensity that extends beyond representation, shaped by time and the artist's sustained attention.

His landscapes, painted en plein air in Los Angeles, capture the transient nature of place itself. Light shifts, clouds drift, and the environment alters—sometimes permanently, as in Eaton Canyon Unfinished, a painting left unfinished after its subject, a home, was lost to the 2025 Eaton Fire. Much like El Greco’s View of Toledo, where cityscape and sky are warped, stretched, and charged with an unnatural intensity, O’Connor’s landscapes have a mannerist quality that resist pure naturalism, favoring the temporal connection to his presence in relation to the landscape.

In an ongoing series of still-life “table paintings,” O’Connor paints objects that accumulate over long periods of time in his studio. Recurring motifs—a plastic colander, lemons, a bust of Michelangelo's David, a zebra’s head, a stemmed rose—exist in layered perspectives, with their own conflicting light sources and scale, blurring distinctions between past and present and disrupting conventional spatial logic. These works function as codices of time spent in the studio, suggesting presence not as a singular moment but as an evolving state.

The paintings and drawings in Flame of Vapor are not contained within a single moment; instead, they unfold over time, capturing the slippages and distortions that occur through prolonged observation. These works function less as fixed images and more as durational pieces, revealing the ways in which painting—like memory—warps, erodes, and reconstructs its subjects through the passage of time.

Kent O’Connor (b. 1987) lives and works in Los Angeles. The artist earned his BFA from Maryland Institute of College of Art and his MFA from Yale University School of Art.

Solo exhibitions include Everything All At Once, Mendes Wood DM, New York (2023); Close the Door Behind You, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2021); New Paintings, Diane Rosenstein, Los Angeles (2018); Flower Paintings, The Study, New Haven, CT (2017).

Recent group exhibitions include PROGRAM, Matthew Brown, New York (2024); Arcadia and Elsewhere, James Cohan, New York (2024); Papertrail, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2023); Uncanny Interiors, Nicola Vassel, New York (2022); Art Basel Miami Beach, Josh Lilley, Miami (2022); Their Private Worlds Contained the Memory of a Painting that has Shapes as Reassuring as the Uncanny Footage of a Sonogram, curated by Sedrick Chisom, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2022); The Scenic Route, 1969 Gallery, New York (2021); It Seems So Long Ago, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2020); Open Air, Tong Art Advisory, East Hampton, NY (2020); Seven Year Itch, Diane Rosenstein, Los Angeles (2019); Way Out Now, Diane Rosenstein, Los Angeles (2018); Heads/Tails, Next to Nothing, New York (2018); and Oily Doily, BBQ LA, Los Angeles (2016).

O’Connor’s work is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum, CA.

He has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Mendes Wood DM, Brussels opening this fall.