Archive 2008-09
Hughie O’Donoghue
- Venue: Fine Art Lecture Theatre
- Start: Wed, 06 May 2009 11:00:00 BST
- End: Wed, 06 May 2009 13:00:00 BST
“To be a painter at the beginning of the 21st century requires courage. For painting has been declared as dead as Nietzsche’s God, irrelevant as a medium of expression in this fast moving, ‘lets’have-it-all-now’ age. Of course there are many young painters who have made their names within the new postmodern orthodoxy, using shock and irony or a discussion of the language of paint as their primary tools but there can be few who have so seriously engaged with history and the painterly canon as Hughie O’Donoghue.
O’Donoghue freely intermingles the mythic and the real, mixing events from history with a sense of personal quest to create grand, encompassing statements that deal with the universal, something attempted by few other contemporary painters, except, perhaps, the German artist, Anslem Kiefer. His subjects are archetypal: war, memory, time and what it means to be human, to define the trajectory of a life. Historic events act as catalysts; but it would be a mistake to suggest that he is either a narrative or a modern-day history painter. Rather his work explores the past, using the wanderings of a soldier - his father Daniel O’Donoghue – as he travels through the ravaged war-torn zones of Europe with the retreating forces during the Fall of France in 1940 and the crossing of the Rapido in the 1944 Battle of Monte Casinno. In fact all O’Donoghue’s works essentially add up to one master work; a journey of self-discovery of almost Wagnerian proportions. He draws parallels with the “classic epic poem with the individual pictures functioning like chapters, verses or lines.”
O'Donoghue is an artist deeply embedded in the history of painting and the work of masters such as Titian and Géricault. Yet to be a painter today is to employ a language that has, in many ways, been sidelined by photography, film and video, where the veracity of an image can easily be blurred.