Introducing Hughie O’Donoghue…

HISTORY, MEMORY AND MYTH ALL PART OF ‘THE JOURNEY’ AT LEEDS ART GALLERY

Royal Academician Hughie O’Donoghue paints bold, brave and expansive paintings.

His powerfully figurative works often draw on influences from the old masters, and look at his favoured subjects of history, memory and myth through a lens of abstract expressionism.

A particular focus of his work is his father, Daniel, an infantryman in WW2 who told of his experiences of the war in letters home to his wife.

It is these accounts, along with objects Daniel carried with him: his flute, goggles, sheet music, a camera and books that O’Donoghue uses to construct his art.

Over the last decade photography has played an increasingly important part in Hughie O’Donoghue’s work, and it is this use of photography as well as painted images in his art, that produce a type of multi-layered effect, in which images appear as memories rising to the surface of murky water.

“My paintings are about the still image” says O’Donoghue, “but the influences and sources of inspiration in my work are drawn from many different areas, from life and memory, from documentary film and cinema, historical archives, newspapers and books and from my own collection of discarded and found material”

O’Donoghue brings his much anticipated new exhibition, ‘The Journey’ to Leeds Art Gallery this September - a rare chance to see his work in the UK.

“The journey referenced in the exhibition is the spiritual journey that all individuals have to make and therefore it is a metaphor for personal growth.” Asserts O’Donoghue, “It is less important that someone understands all the references contained within a picture than that they experience it. It may be that they connect with it in ways that I could never have predicted. The experience, the encounter is what is important, this is how ‘meaning ‘ is arrived at.”

‘The Journey’ features many paintings that have not been seen before such as large works; The Leavetaking, The Last Summer, Course of the Diver, The Yellow Man 1V. It also includes paintings that have been seen in England before, Raft, The Measure of all Things, Baiae and Blue Water. It is O’Donoghue’s first exhibition since being made a Royal Academician and his first individual museum show in England since Painting Caserta Red at The Imperial War Museum in 2004.

All the works chosen for his new exhibition deal with journeys in one context or another. Whilst some of O’Donoghues journeys are metaphysical, some are also literal - like his Yellow Man series. The Yellow Man series is inspired by Van Gogh’s ‘The Painter on the Road to Tarascon’, which only exists in photo’s after being lost during a WW2 bombing raid. O’Donoghues fascinating work creates a potent synergy between Van Gogh’s lost painting, the series by Francis Bacon based on the same work, and the seemingly unrelated event of an RAF plane en route to bomb Cologne in 1944.

Hughie O’Donoghue is one of the most ambitious and significant painters currently at work in the Britain, and his powerful paintings are often compared to those of Anselm Kiefer and Francis Bacon.

Born in 1953, Hughie O’Donoghue has been exhibiting internationally in solo and group exhibitions since 1982, and his recent CV boasts The Hague, Netherlands, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, and the James Hyman Gallery, London - all in 2008.

O’Donoghue was made a Royal Academician in 2009.  Founded in 1768, membership in the Royal Academy is limited to 80 full members, among the greatest living names in contemporary British art. The Academy’s rules state that there must always be at least fourteen sculptors, twelve architects, and eight printmakers.

A full colour publication, including an interview with the Artist by Michael Peppiatt accompanies the exhibition, which runs from 11 September until 15 November 2009.

Written by: Dominique