




Is this the real life?
Norman O'Flynn
In this exhibition O’Flynn transforms interiors into charged stages where culture, history and memory collide. Each reverse-glass painting documents the now – a moment oversaturated with images, icons and contradictions. The works assemble fragments of mass culture and art history into domestic scenes that feel at once familiar and unreal. Spam and Tweety Bird, Picasso and Murakami, Stephen King and Michael Jackson all share the same rooms. They do not belong together, yet here they coexist, much as they do in our digital feeds and our daily lives O’Flynn’s interior paintings also hold the tension between good and evil, the comic and the tragic, the sacred and the absurd. A Warhol portrait of Michael Jackson presides over a room where a toy figure hides in grief. A Guernica figure screams across a waiting room lined with cartoonish serpent chairs. A dollar sign hangs beside an astronaut’s helmet, collapsing the gap between money and the cosmos.
The question that gives the exhibition its title hovers throughout; Is this the real life? These paintings mirror the disorientation of our time – bright, anxious, layered, and unstable – where comfort and collapse coexist, and reality itself feels both hyper-visible and out of reach.



