New work- The Sound Of A Bomb In The Next Street.

"An Unremarkable Murder in Manchester."                                                                O'Keeffe 2011     (oil on canvas)  133x183 cm

The Sound Of A Bomb In The Next Street.

‘I remember the sound of the bomb that went off in the Sussex pub. I heard it from my studio on the 7th floor at St Martin’s looking down the Charring Cross road. I didn’t realize the thump in the air was the Sussex blowing up. We had just been drinking in there.

The Sussex wasn’t my last close call.’

The bomb in the Sussex was one of many near misses that O’Keeffe has endured including the King’s Cross Underground fire in 1987 and the IRA attacks on both the stock exchange (1990) and Bishopgate (1993) whilst O’Keeffe was working in the City as a night watchman.

In 2006 O’Keeffe endured hopefully his last life threatening brush with death on a motorway in Ireland-

Now having finally recovered from the accident in 2006, O’Keeffe’s new paintings describe a world of uncertainty in which the only constant is a sense of looming threat or dread.

Images of earth stopping murders committed in seconds on a whim, armed robberies discussed and planned in the cold, ordinary light of day... life threatening decisions taken with nonchalance or indifference as if death was just a mistake that could be undone or repaired. The new paintings include images of drunken thefts or fatal spur of the moment alcohol fueled swims from wind swept promenades ....all result in mistakes that cannot be reversed.

O'Keeffe updates Stanley Spencer's use of the English village as a setting for Christian holiness by literally dropping an aeroplane engine on it. He has replaced the saints feeding birds on the village green with a stab victim and has placed the cat that curled around Christ's feet as he carried his cross past Spencer's house in the dust bin.

The new work explores the devastating consequences and reverberations of people's behaviour from Mary Bale's transformation into "Catbinwoman" following the apparently casual disposal of a neighbour's pet on her way to work and the resulting catastrophic crumbling of her life to the ‘moors murderer’ Ian Brady’s calculated, utterly destructive and eternally reverberating acts of inhumanity.

 Please click here to see the works

 For More Information Contact : anthonyokeeffe@hotmail.com

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