This is Hughie O’Donoghue’s first solo exhibition in New York. Shown here are nine works dating from 2003 to 2026 that evoke memory, past history, identity, dreams, and myth through a combination of painterly layering and reappropriated imagery. O’Donoghue incorporates photographic images into his works to provide a narrative, to create other-worldly, mysterious landscapes, an epic journey, a rite of passage, that triggers the subconscious.
Many ideas and stories can be read within one work, and the many layers can be peeled away to reveal what lies beneath, just like the process of how these works are made. Even down to the material they’re made on – Night Cargo (2024) on flour sacks patchworked together, seven others on tarpaulin – materials usually associated with covering things up, but now they’re the ground upon which these images are constructed and revealed. Each is a hybrid of sculpture, painting and photography, a bringing together of elements combined to create beautiful, ambiguous, yet often disturbing works.
The industrial quality of tarpaulin adds to the history of the work itself. To prepare a tarp, the wax needs to be removed, then the surface primed. They arrive folded, the creases providing an organic grid on which to place the image. Oil, acrylic, and metallic paints contribute to the layering. The photographic element is printed onto Japanese tissue, then laminated to the surface with resin, often repeated to create more layers, with areas sanded away, then transparent glazes applied to create even more texture and depth.
O’Donoghue’s studio in Ireland, close to the Atlantic coast and his maternal country, is a source of some of the imagery he uses. The Plassy shipwreck, he first observed as a child on Inis Oirr – the same ship appearing repeatedly in several works on show here, including Wake (2021). The fraught relationship of man to the sea. The journey or voyage as metaphor – a currach to the Otherworld perhaps? Ships are a symbol of his personal memories. Photographs from the Imperial War Museum archives, seen when tracing his father’s involvement in the Second World War, are also sources of inspiration.
O’Donoghue tells me his works aren’t concerned with form, sophistication, that they’re about the vernacular. Anyone viewing his works should be able to understand what they’re seeing and pick up essential information from looking without knowing what they’re about, without reading a text or label. I’m not sure that’s true. His works require a second or third look – something else emerges, and a transformation or metamorphosis occurs, and what you first saw takes on new meaning – again, everything changes.
Hughie O’Donoghue, Cargo 2016-17
The monumental work, Cargo (2016/17), hung on the end wall and measures around 24 feet long, depicting the looming hull of a vessel apparently at sea, though it’s ambiguous. Flecks of gold leaf shine through the ghostly, silvery layers in places, moments of sheer beauty in such an ominous work. In The Steady Drummer (2017), on the adjacent wall, a similar ship emerges from the mist, but this time, a warmer golden glow surrounds the vessel, and a Turner-esque quality pervades. You can almost smell the rust. To the right, we see the yellow sun, though on second glance, lurking in the hazy vapour, skeletal figures materialise – this is no sun, it’s a drum beaten by a clatter from Holbein’s Danse Macabre, the title of this work a line from A.E. Housman’s poem on soldiers marching towards their death, a memento mori of sorts.
In Night Visitor (2017), a solitary figure on the left strolls towards a church on a hillside through the landscape. To me, at first, his stance recalls that of Van Gogh’s The Sower, inspired by Millet. O’Donoghue tells me, however, that this nightmarish figure is actually the vampiric Count Orlok from Murnau and Grau’s film Nosferatu from 1922, carrying his coffin. The film is itself an allegory of World War I and forms part of O’Donoghue’s own visual history and memory, seeing it as a teenager. He says silent cinema has a lot in common with painting, as the emphasis is on the image.
Hughie O’Donoghue, Time and The Architecture of Memory, New York, installation view
In November last year, O’Donoghue began a new version on tarp of a work called Tomb of the Diver, originally made in 2002. From across the gallery, at first glance, a menhir or standing stone stands proudly within the landscape, glowing in the sunlight and silhouetted against a Titian-blue sky. Once again, a second glance reveals more – a diving or falling figure emerges as in the Paestum wall paintings referenced in the work’s title. But here in New York, the plummeting figure takes on a different meaning and recalls that sunny September day that this year marks its 25th anniversary. Then you notice the black sky along the top, an intense, deep black repeated on the bottom right, fading to grey as it spreads horizontally across to the left, as if calligraphy ink was applied with a brush. This black cross evokes the mangled girders left after the attack. Below the figure is an aerial image of the ruined town of Cassino, where O’Donoghue’s father fought in the 1944 battle. There’s a lot going on. This piece is particularly sculptural, partly because of the way it’s hung from the top, so the tarp bends and undulates along the bottom edge.
The smaller work, A Tree Grows (2025), the image taken at the Guinness Estate at Laggala (meaning a hollow in the mountains) is one of a series featuring individual trees. The background, I’m told, is an abandoned picture, reused and sanded. The collage effect again provides an aesthetic of repair, black pockmarks echoing the mould or lichen appearing on older trees in the damp atmosphere. Atlantic Diagram (2022), another work featuring multiple images, shows a fishing boat being repaired, a map of the Atlantic Irish coast, and the Atlantic itself in yet another square. Repair and reuse are constant themes of O’Donoghue, not only in the making of works but also in the subject matter.
A Monument in Rouen (2003) is viewed as you exit the gallery. A striking sepia image mounted on a prepared book, reminding me of Andrew Cranston’s work, is also the smallest work in the show. It shows an abandoned motorcycle camp in a wood and looks like a still from a World War Two movie. O’Donoghue’s father rode a motorbike as a reconnaissance rider in France, 1940. Its quiet stillness moves me profoundly, a prescient moment frozen in time.
In this exhibition, O’Donoghue is trying to make sense of the world through collective memory. What do we know about the past? He quotes Cicero, “To be ignorant of history is to remain always a child. For what is a man’s lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times.” These freighted works stop you – their beauty and energy pull you in, make you look deeper – intense and personal memories of your own climbing out through the layers.
Hughie O’Donoghue: Time and The Architecture of Memory, Until 16 April 2026, 447 SPACE W 17th St, New York 10011
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