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

Stephen Hannock, Marlborough Fine Art, London - Moving Water, Fleeting Light

Stephen Hannock
Moving Water, Fleeting Light
Marlborough Fine Art, London
5 February – 1 March 2014

Marlborough Fine Art presents an exhibition of Stephen Hannock’s recent paintings. Stephen Hannock, born in Albany, New York, in 1951, lives and works in Williamstown and North Adams, Massachusetts.

Stephen Hannock began his career as an apprentice to Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) while studying art on exchange at Smith College. Early mentors also included the Massachusetts curators and art historians Elizabeth and Agnes Mongan of the Smith College Museum of Art and the Fogg Art Museum, respectively. After developing a novel technique using unstable phosphorescent acrylic paints in the 1970s to explore illuminative effects, in the early 1980s Stephen Hannock moved to Manhattan and fully engaged with the downtown contemporary art scene. He returned to Massachusetts in 2003. Landscape has since been his predominant motif, coupled with an evolving mastery of technique resulting in pictures that appear to glow from within.

Stephen Hannock’s first exhibition in London features thirteen new paintings. A number of these, including a winged and glowing view above Newcastle in northeast England that explores the region’s rich history titled Northern City Renaissance (Mass MoCA #161), Great Falls at Dawn for Xu Bing (Mass MoCA #180), and Oxbow II, for Frank Moore and Dan Hodermarsky (Mass MoCA #207), bear his signature, novel technique of working with acrylics, resin, pasted papers and photographs, specialized brushes, and power sanders to produce light effects unrivaled in painting. Stephen Hannock’s approach involves layering subtly modulated acrylic or oil paint across the support, repeated polishing with sanders, and veneers of reflective resin burnished to a matte sheen allowing light to penetrate the stratum of the picture and reflect back with exceptional illumination. Pasted materials are fixed in the layers in the tradition of papiers collés, a method introduced by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque a century ago. The pictures are also covered with handwritten text—comments on locations imaged, giving histories either personal to the artist or relevant to the sites. Stephen Hannock works these lines of text, which are not preconceived, into the topography of the image.

Other works feature motifs of flooded rivers and soaring rockets, drawing on the rich English landscape traditions of J.M.W. Turner and James McNeill Whistler, and Waiting for Ophelia (Mass MoCA #205), inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite work of John Everett Millais.

Stephen Hannock’s work is found in public collections throughout the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Yale University Art Gallery, and numerous other collections.

Jason Rosenfeld, Ph.D., Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College, New York, has curated the exhibition. A fully illustrated colour catalogue, with essays and entries on the pictures by Dr. Rosenfeld is available.

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

Avigdor Arikha, Marlborough Fine Art, London - Works from 1966 – 2010

Avigdor Arikha: Works from 1966 – 2010
Marlborough Fine Art, London
9 October 2013 - 2 November 2013

Marlborough Fine Art London presents an exhibition of significant works by Avigdor Arikha (1929 – 2010) from his estate.  

Many children draw, but Avigdor Arikha’s drawings were noticed at the age of twelve, when he was deported to a Romanian-run concentration camp in Transnistria. His drawings of the harrowing scenes he had witnessed in the camp, were shown to Red Cross delegates, and were the catalyst for the transportation of Avigdor Arikha and 1500 further children to Palestine in 1944. After studying at Jerusalem’s Bezalel School of Art, followed by a scholarship to the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, Avigdor Arikha struck up close friendships with Alberto Giacometti and Samuel Beckett, whose sparing use of language taught him the significance of every brush stroke. These friendships lasted throughout their lives and accompanied Avigdor Arikha in the creative shift from his abstract period to what he described as his ‘post-abstract naturalism’. 

The exhibition covers the last 45 years of Avigdor Arikha’s life. He lived as an artist, writer, lecturer and curator. It explores Avigdor Arikha’s diverse use of mediums, ranging from pencil, graphite and ink brush (notably Sumi ink), drawings, etchings and aquatint prints, to oils, watercolours and colour pastels. Avigdor Arikha’s estate is notable in its diversity of subject matter, in which no one genre is privileged over another. Instead, it is the execution of the works that holds utmost importance. 

The transience of passing instances can be perceived in Avigdor Arikha’s work, in which the unnoticed and unchecked becomes a lasting and permanent subject, revealing the strangeness of familiar objects, angles and bodies, the fragility of what we observe, and at the same time, its continuance.

A fully illustrated catalogue was published.

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