Bernadette O’Toole lives and works in the UK, she is currently based at the Bluecoat Studios Liverpool and is represented by BITR Gallery Gainsborough.
O’Toole’s paintings, drawings and recent installations reflect her ongoing fascination with the architectural spaces we construct, both real and imagined, and our relationship to these spaces.
O’Toole’s work is characterized by highly individual combinations of figurative and abstract elements. The constructed spaces in her paintings seem to operate on a sensory level, conscious of the observer and the way in which seeing is interchangeable with revelation. O’Toole’s considered handling of the paint is used as an illusionistic device, as a sensory mode of apprehension. This is a restless world of edges and planes, charged with an emotional energy which if fugitive and illusive, can be captured and held on the surface of the painting. Her more recent circular paintings suggesting unpopulated landscapes where planes collide and distort giving rise to complex and unstable readings.
Recent Exhibitions include: London Art Fair 2011, Marmite Painting Prize 2011, Turning up the Quiet, The Globe Gallery, Newcastle 2010, and Turning up the Quiet, Liverpool Biennial 2010
Bernadette O’Toole. Photo c. McCoy Wynne