O’Brien was awarded the prize for his presentation at Frieze Focus, with his gallery Ginny on Frederick, centred around a large site-specific sculpture—Volent—which repurposed an historical English horse-racing carriage, wrapping it in layers of industrial polythene.
O’Brien describes the objects and materials he incorporates in his work as “eloquent texts” that encode cultural and historical meaning. Manipulating them by twisting, binding, stretching or puncturing feels charged with the erotic and probes at taboo, fetish and the commodification of queer aesthetics. His signature gesture of tightly wrapping objects with industrial polythene submits them to a kind of restraint that accentuates their outer form whilst withholding full legibility, pushing towards abstraction. O’Brien’s practice encompasses painting and drawing as well as sculpture exploring the production of desire and the aesthetic codes of late-capitalist consumption.
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