ARTISTS TALKING

Hughie O'Donoghue established his artistic reputation as a painter. In 1995 he produced The Way Home, his first work using the carborundum process – a printing method using a granular compound of carbon and silica. This exhibition highlights further carborundum prints as well as related paintings and drawings from 1995 to 2000.

Two themes predominate, the Passion– a longstanding preoccupation of O'Donoghue's – and a more recent interest in the Second World War. This latter focus is partly stimulated by his father's correspondence home whilst serving as a dispatch rider in Europe and in later works through images from The Imperial War Museum archives.

Themes are re-worked and re-appropriated in different media and at varying scales, presented as unfocused narratives. Only the titles provide a sense of linearity: Crossing the Seine, German tanks, Forges-les Eaux, Getting out at Cherbourg. The epic is eschewed, as is any specific political context or viewpoint. Specific references, whether human or machine, are submerged within the canvases. The turret of a tank and the silhouette of a ship's bow reveal themselves only gradually from the dark ash of paint, emerging from within the painting's predominantly abstract form; mirroring the artists' view of the work as "uncovering, covering a moment in time".

O'Donoghue has frequently been characterised as following in the traditions of the romantics or the abstract expressionists. His latest works though do not entirely reside within either of these familiar categories nor can they be easily assimilated into the canon of war artists. His works provoke the personal rather than the polemical and are without ego, inviting much more than a merely superficial engagement.