The Linden Trees — Maureen O'Leary

Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to present The Linden Trees, a solo exhibition of recent paintings and writings by Maureen O’Leary. This is the artist's second solo show with the gallery. The exhibition opens Saturday, October 31st, and will be on view through Saturday, December 19th. An opening reception with the artist will be held during the inaugural Art Week NYC, on Friday, November 13th, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. Coinciding with the exhibition, the artist will release an animated film and a publication with the same title. The gallery will also present new paintings by O’Leary at the ADAA Fair from November 12th through 16th.

The Linden Trees is O’Leary’s first narrative painting installation. Composed of thirty-four oil paintings and thirty-five text panels written by the artist, the work gives new life to two female characters from 19th-century Russian literature: Natasha Rostova from Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Princess Polina from Alexander Pushkin's unfinished story Roslavlev. O’Leary reimagines what might have been possible for these women had their artistic ambitions not been constrained, diminished, or left unresolved by the narratives that first contained them.

O'Leary describes The Linden Trees as an "answer song." The convention borrows from the tradition of early twentieth-century American blues music, in which one song is written in response to an earlier one. Here, she uses painting and text to answer back to literary history. Set in Napoleonic-era Russia and told through the eyes of Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei, the story brings Natasha and Polina together in a new tale about the friendship of women, the creative process, love, and artistic independence. Historical figures and political currents from the period, including Decembrism, deepen the work's meditation on failed revolutions, feminist aspiration, and the long struggle for change. Further, The Linden Trees explores how literature can both reflect and reinforce social structures that confine women's creative and personal autonomy.

The paintings depict interiors, gardens, roads, battlefields, Paris ballrooms, and Moscow salons, translating O’Leary’s narrative into vivid, compressed scenes. Saturated color, flattened space, and fluid handling of form produce compositions that hover between figuration and abstraction, giving each episode the charge of a remembered image or dream. Motifs of plants, moons, weapons and horse carriages, written letters, and rooms recur throughout the installation, carrying the viewer between intimate scenes and a larger narrative shaped by war, displacement, artistic ambition, and political change. Bringing reading into the physical space of painting, O’Leary invites viewers to move between image and text, fragment and sequence, past and possibility. What emerges is not an illustration of Tolstoy or Pushkin, but the artist’s own painterly story of women artists imagined beyond the limits of the books—and the social hierarchies—that made them.

The presentation at the gallery follows The Linden Tree’s debut at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris in late 2025.

Maureen O'Leary's (b. 1965, Washington, DC) paintings hover between figuration and abstraction. Her mundane scenes become substrates for experimentation with the application of paint and the evolving notion of what is real. O'Leary's work has been exhibited at the Custom House in Westport, Ireland, Fondation des États-Unis, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, Art Lab Tokyo, Midwest Center for Photography, Artspace, Power Plant Gallery at Duke University, Valdosta State University Fine Arts Gallery, Staten Island Museum, Meadows Gallery - University of Texas at Tyler, and more. She is the recipient of the Brooklyn Arts Council - Brooklyn Arts Fund Grant and the Harriet Hale Woolley Fellowship from the Fondation des États-Unis.