Hughie O’Donoghue @ Marlborough Gallery, London - Deep Water and the Architecture of Memory

Hughie O’Donoghue

Deep Water and the Architecture of Memory

Marlborough, London

Through 15 January 2022

HUGHIE O'DONOGHUE

Blue Water, 2018

Mixed media on prepared tarpaulin, 237 x 302 cm

© Hughie O'Donoghue, courtesy Marlborough, London

Marlborough London presents Hughie O’Donoghue: Deep Water and the Architecture of Memory, an exhibition of large-scale works by Hughie O’Donoghue RA (born 1953).

At the core of this new body of work is the artist’s deep-rooted interest in interrogating the way memory is forged through generations. Drawing on his own memories as a child, the substantial works on tarpaulin exhibited in the show depict the MV Plassy which was wrecked in a storm off the coast of Inisheer in 1960. The shipwreck, which has been a recurring motif in O’Donoghue’s practice for over twenty years, has an imposingly theatrical, almost sculptural presence. Glowing with phosphorescent shades of rusty reds and yellows, the ship seems to witness its own slow demise whilst the sea around it remains a continuously moving yet immutable force.

Materiality is a focal aspect of this striking body of work. Primarily using repurposed materials such as sackcloth and sandbags, Hughie O’Donoghue creates an idiosyncratic tension between the realism of his imagery and the physicality of the works. This contrast is achieved through a complex superposition of photographic images with layers of resin, acrylic and oil paint whilst also embracing the irregularities of the materials. The subtly nuanced hues of his compositions are testament to Hughie O’Donoghue’s interest in the tradition of oil painting and were inspired by the lavish colours of Old Master painters such as Titian, whose works he studied as an artist-in-residence at the National Gallery in 1984.

Deep Water and the Architecture of Memory celebrates the artist’s unique ability to excavate history in an almost archaeological manner in order to investigate contemporary questions of memory and identity. Charged with metaphorical, though never fully formulated subject matters, the works in this exhibition invite the viewer to immerse themselves in the artist’s thought and working process, ultimately challenging them to confront their own relationship with identity.

Born in Manchester in 1953, Hughie O’Donoghue lives and works in London and County Mayo, Ireland. He obtained an MA in Fine Art at the Goldsmiths College, London, and was an artist-in-residence at the National Gallery, London, in 1984 and at St John’s College, Oxford, in 2000. Hughie O’Donoghue was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2009. His work has been widely exhibited in Britain and Europe. An exhibition of his work will open at the National Gallery of Ireland in March 2022.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an introduction by Thomas Marks and an essay by Hughie O’Donoghue.

MARLBOROUGH GALLERY

6 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BY

www.marlboroughgallery.com

Hughie O’Donoghue @ Marlborough Fine Art, London - Scorched Earth

Hughie O’Donoghue: Scorched Earth
Marlborough Fine Art, London 
15 March - 14 April 2018

Hughie O’Donoghue 

‘Lavender Field’, 2017-18 

Oil on prepared tarpaulin, 179 x 238 cm. 

Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Fine Art

Marlborough Fine Art presents Scorched Earth, a solo exhibition of new works by acclaimed British artist HUGHIE O'DONOGHUE.

Hughie O’Donoghue often uses historic events and figures from art history as a point of departure in his work. In this exhibition, the artist questions the legacy of Vincent Van Gogh in our collective cultural memory, particularly focusing on the paintings Van Gogh made during the last two years of his life in Arles and St. Remy in the south of France.

Hughie O’Donoghue 

‘When the Last Fires Have Burned Out’, 2017-18 

Oil on linen canvas, 125 x 158 cm. 

Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Fine Art

Technically inventive and on a human scale, Hughie O’Donoghue’s richly worked new paintings revisit and reimagine the imagery observed and invented by Van Gogh as he struggled to make a lucid vision manifest while his health deteriorated in demoralising circumstances. Although personally familiar with Arles, St. Remy and the setting of the Saint-Paul asylum where Van Gogh was a patient, having first visited the area in 1973, Hughie O’Donoghue has chosen to situate these paintings in his own immediate environment: the enclosed fields beside his studio. The subject therefore is brought into Hughie O’Donoghue’s own territory and field of vision.

On show are new large scale paintings which reimagine some of the seminal late works of Van Gogh, in particular the lost painting The Painter on the Road to Tarascon but also The Wheatfield with a Reaper and Enclosed Field with a Peasant, both shown in London as part of The Real Van Gogh at The Royal Academy 2010. The encounter with these two paintings sowed the imaginative seeds in Hughie O’Donoghue that have led to this new body of works.

Hughie O’Donoghue 

Photography by Anthony Hobbs 

Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Fine Art

HUGHIE O'DONOGHUE 

Born in Manchester in 1953, Hughie O'Donoghue lives and works in London and County Mayo, Ireland. He was elected member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2009 and to Aosdána (an Irish association of artists) in 2013. He has been an artist-in-residence at the National Gallery, London and St John’s College, Oxford. He received an Honorary Doctorate from the National University of Ireland in 2005. Since 2011 the artist’s work has been represented by Marlborough. His work has been exhibited widely in Britain (including solo exhibitions at: Leighton House Museum, London, 2016; University Gallery, Newcastle, 2013; Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, 2012; Leeds City Art Gallery, 2009; Imperial War Museum, 2003; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and touring, 2001-03; and Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 1999), as well as in Ireland, Germany, France, Holland and the Czech Republic.

A fully illustrated catalogue with an introduction by Martin Gayford accompanies the exhibition.

MARLBOROUGH FINE ART  
6 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BY
www.marlboroughlondon.com

Hughie O'Donoghue, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin - Naming the Fields

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

www.rubicongallery.ie