Evie O’Connor

Artist Profile

Evie O’Connor (b. 1993, Glossop, Derbyshire). Lives and works in Glossop, Derbyshire.

Evie O’Connor paints scenes of wealth and leisure as a way of examining class and aspiration in contemporary Britain. Working in oil and acrylic, mostly on small wooden panels, she depicts hotel pools, sun loungers, private members’ clubs and luxury interiors, places that most viewers encounter only through screens.

Her compositions are assembled from her own photographic archive, travel review sites and images circulated on social media, which she recombines into new, often unpeopled scenes. Many works are around 30 x 20 cm, painted in smooth, flat passages of saturated colour. The swimming pool recurs throughout, alongside named locations such as Annabel’s in Mayfair, the Côte d’Azur and Monaco. Titles are short and pointed, and frequently borrow the language of lifestyle marketing, as in Abundant living (goop) (2022). For The Gulf (2023) she turned to London’s five-star hotels as presented in British television documentaries. You Are Here (2024), shown at Glossop railway station, combined paintings with research in the town’s local archives.

O’Connor completed a Foundation Diploma at Manchester School of Art in 2012 and a BA (Hons) in Fashion Textiles at London College of Fashion in 2015, before taking an MLitt in Fine Art Painting at Glasgow School of Art in 2018. She has held solo exhibitions at Taymour Grahne Projects, London (2021, 2023), Galeria Pelaires, Mallorca (2021), and Maruani Mercier, Belgium (2022). Group exhibitions include Suppose You Are Not at Arter, Istanbul (2024), and Painters - London at Half Gallery, New York (2023). She has held residencies at Sarabande: The Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation, OOF Gallery in London and Dumfries House. In 2018 she illustrated Care, published by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.