Hughie O'Donoghue : Naming the Fields
Rubicon Gallery, Dublin
23 October - 24 November 2001
Naming the Fields is the first showing of new paintings by Hughie O’Donoghue in Ireland. The Rubicon Gallery is double in size to host the exhibition incorporating a street level space below their first floor gallery at No.10 St. Stephens Green. Hughie O’Donoghue is one of Irelands most important painters with an established reputation in the U.K., Europe and U.S.A.. He exhibits regularly with Rubicon Gallery Dublin, Purdy Hicks Gallery London, Galerie Karl Pfefferle Munich and Galerie Helmut Pabst Frankfurt and has recently featured in major museum exhibitions in Haus Der Kunst Munich, Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin, Whitworth Art Gallery Manchester, Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge and he has a major project planned for 2002 at The Imperial War Museum London. He is represented in several public collections among them: The Hugh Lane Gallery and I.M.M.A. Dublin, The National gallery and The British Museum London, The Art Gallery of New South Wales Adelaide and Yale centre for British Art New Haven USA.
The focus in Naming the Fields is the idea of place and in particular the mythic and emotional attachment to particular ground. An exploration of how this resonates within human memory and in a very fundamental way affects who we think we are. An elderly aunt went to great pains to impress upon the artist, the names of the fields that surrounded the house where she and his mother were born. These were drawn out on a rough piece of paper with the translations from the Irish. In some cases the meanings remained unclear. Hughie O’Donoghue was affected by the poetry of this; the attempt to write things down on the rudimentary map, to try to record this truth. The new paintings take these texts and some names from the surrounding town lands as their starting point and attempt to begin to reconstruct some of this lost meaning, to give form to this remembered culture. The artist’s research yielded a 16th Century representation of County Mayo and the area of the Barony of Erris, his place of origin. Of this region, there is virtually nothing recorded - it is a tabula rasa. The paintings seek in some way to stand in this space. They are not descriptive or topographical evocations of a lost landscape but instead attempt to excavate personal and collective cultural memory. Their theme is identity and displacement and they seek in some way to trace and map this, a notion which is potent and relevant to many Irish people or indeed many displaced people.
Hughie O’Donoghue was born in Manchester in 1953. He earned a Masters in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University and for several years lived and worked in London. In 1995 he bought a house and moved his family and his studio practise to a rural area in Co. Kilkenny Ireland. Since relocating to Ireland, Hughie O’Donoghue has explored ideas around Memory and History. His source, in most cases, is a documentary archive of letters, photographs and ephemera inherited after his father’s death. The artist’s father was born in Manchester in 1918 to an Irish immigrant family and was conscripted into the British Army at the outbreak of War. The material relates to family history in general, but in particular detail to the period of the Second World War in which his father was involved. Hughie O’Donoghue has made a number of exhibitions that dealt specifically with particular historic moments. Line of Retreat (1997) dealt with the 1940 retreat of the British Forces and the collapse of the French Republic;Crossing the Rapido (1998/99) addressed the crossing of the Rapido River south of Rome in 1944. Smoke Signals (2000) showed works from both these sequences.Corp (1998) at IMMA was an attempt to map underlying themes within the work over about 15 years and place them within a broader context. As well as being specific and personal each series of work attempts to use allegory and metaphor - ‘meaning’ as a product of engagement with the subject as opposed to something placed knowingly in the work. ‘Episodes from the Passion’ (a commissioned sequence of work, which filled the entire upper gallery spaces of the RHA in 1999) and other monumental works were recently selected for Schirn Kunsthalle’s survey exhibition Geschichte und Erinnerung Kunst der Gegenwart (History and Memory in Contemporary Art). Other works on this theme will also be included in the international exhibition Legacy of Absence due to open at Buchenwald in 2002.
Catalogue Available
RUBICON GALLERY
10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2
