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David Eager Maher​

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EMPIRE

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7 Nov - 12 Dec 2025

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Oliver Sears Gallery is pleased to present Empire, a new solo exhibition by David Eager Maher. Recognised for his internationally celebrated work in the field of contemporary drawing, Eager Maher now turns to oil painting with a series of works on linen that mark a bold new departure in his practice. This is the artist’s first solo presentation of painting in its most direct and traditional form—oil on linen—delivered with his trademark intensity.

 

Empire draws visual and conceptual influence from the mythology of the so-called “New World” - the 19th-century vision of the American frontier as an open, boundless, and bountiful landscape. Through hyper-detailed landscapes rendered in vibrant colour and fine brushwork, Eager Maher interrogates the visual tropes used to sell this dream of limitless opportunity and manifest destiny. Under vivid skies and majestic terrains lies a quiet dissonance—a friction between surface beauty and the ideological machinery beneath.

 

Eager Maher’s work resides at the edge of contemporary painting discourse, where historical references are dismantled and reassembled through the lens of image culture, reproduction, and speculative fiction. The paintings are rich with cinematic perspective and painterly confidence, yet remain enigmatic and unstable—hovering between sincerity and satire.

 

This exhibition questions not just how landscape has been painted, but why—and to what end. By revisiting the genre with a contemporary eye, Eager Maher draws attention to painting’s enduring role in shaping the cultural imagination, especially in times of political drift and environmental uncertainty.

 

Empire invites the viewer into seductive terrain - lush, layered, and strange - only to subtly unravel the certainty of its premise.

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