The Complex presents newly commissioned site-specific work by Aleana Egan, Áine McBride, Dennis McNulty and Conor O’Sullivan in the Ground Floor Gallery, a repurposed warehouse originally used for the ripening of bananas. The exhibition is the third in The Complex’s programme for 2021 entitled “Nature echoes Reality, Artifice echoes Fiction'' where artists are invited to consider the gallery’s architecture and context when creating new works.

The curators invited the four artists into a conversation through site visits, Zoom and Signal messages that began around the chemical compound ethylene, which is used to escalate the ripening process of bananas once found in the fridges that filled the Gallery of The Complex. Ethylene is omnipresent and is the basis for many of the world’s most in-demand materials that make up our everyday equipment, from digital technologies to mundane material furnishings.

Aleana Egan creates abstract sculptures that are assembled in multi-layered constellations. Materials such as metal, wood, pigment, and fabric refer to their own properties, while also remaining indeterminate. In this ambiguity, the objects evoke immaterial moments—ideas, thoughts, feelings, moods, energies, and relationships both towards each other as well as interpersonal. Manifested in form, the internal is turned outwards. Translated into sculptural gestures, latent allusions are made visible, and the processual shifts into focus - Melissa Canbaz, 2021
Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Void Gallery, Derry (2022); small field Künstlerhaus Bremen  (2021); New People, Konrad Fischer Gallery, Dusseldorf (2020); Shadowy Forms, NICC Vitrine, Brussels  (2020); and Spitze, Farbvision, Berlin (2019). Selected group exhibitions include Yuugen, CCA Andratx  (2022); The Museum of Ancient History, University College Dublin (2020/2021); from narrow provinces,  Cample Line, Thornhill (2019); staring forms, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin (2019); and Aleana  Egan/Pearl Blauvelt, Mary Mary, Glasgow (2018).