Hughie O’Donoghue
Time and The Architecture of Memory: Selected Paintings 1985 – 2025
February 27 – April 10, 2026
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447 Space is pleased to present the first New York solo exhibition by renowned artist Hughie O’Donoghue. Time and the Architecture of Memory brings together nine works spanning more than three decades, including four large-scale and five smaller pieces. The exhibition highlights O’Donoghue’s mastery of mixing figuration with abstraction, resulting in emotionally charged, monumental explorations of collective memory, personal history, and myth.
Hughie O’Donoghue says: “The images in my paintings emerge from personal experience, memory and the process of painting itself - a series of actions and corrections which eventually resolve themselves. The paintings meditate on their themes, slowly coagulating into their ultimate form.”
O’Donoghue has both a British and Irish background, having been born in Manchester but also residing in the remote Barony of Erris in County Mayo where his mother hailed from. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to understand why he is so highly regarded within both the British and Irish art establishments, bringing together key works by O’Donoghue in New York.
One of the works on view addresses the artist’s grappling with the images and events of one of the deadliest days in the city’s history—9/11, which in 2026 marks its 25th anniversary—through a reimagining of a painting from antiquity. Tomb of the Diver (2002) references the depiction of a diver on an ancient tomb stone making their journey into the afterlife, but in O’Donoghue’s version the plunging figure appears in-between the form of the two towers. Yellow and orange evoke fire with billowing black smoke above.
The layering of multiple ideas and narratives within a single work is a hallmark of O’Donoghue’s practice. Here, the imagery of fire and smoke also alludes to the ruined town of Cassino, depicted at the base of the painting. While in Italy tracing his father’s history as a platoon sergeant during the 1944 Battle of Monte Cassino, O’Donoghue first encountered the original tomb painting at Paestum. The work therefore encompasses many of the artist’s preoccupations – a knowledge of painting and drawing, collective experience and an intense personal history.
Inspiration is also taken from silent cinema, with the photographic trace combining with O’Donoghue’s painting to create eerie and dream-like sights. This includes the grey-scale Cargo (2016), depicting a huge vessel shipwrecked in the ocean with an awestruck sense of scale, while hidden onboard is an image of Count Orlock from F.W Murneau and Albin Grau’s classic Nosferatu (1922). Night Visitor (2017) shows a nightmarish figure approaching a solitary church. Both these works are created on tarpaulin, reflecting different lights depending on its display and the time of the day, so that a shipwreck is sometimes in choppy or calm waters, or the shadowy figure is either the focus or a figment in the wider composition.
These works and many more - encompassing early works and up to present day - will demonstrate how O’Donoghue continues to experiment and innovate throughout a long and acclaimed career, handling the juxtaposition of different ideas and materials, often in the same painting, to create immediate emotional responses that live long in the memory.
Curator Dr. Tanja Pirsig Marshall, Deputy Director LWL-Museum for Art and Culture, Munster, Germany, says: “Hughie O’Donoghue's achievement is to bring back the grand narratives of history painting. He has a unique ability to command emotional and serious subject-matter from ancient to recent times, from the classical to personal sources. Memories, says the writer W.G. Sebald, lie slumbering within all of us. What would we do without memory? The work of an artist whose preoccupations with history, memory and identity have never felt more important. Working with memory is one of the most challenging themes and one which O’Donoghue has successfully employed for decades, recognising that memory carries the personal emotional resonances often subsumed in official and public histories.”
Fiona Kearney, Director for Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland, says: “I am hugely excited to see the scale of Cargo installed in the 447 Space, it is a thematic that will resonate so strongly, not just with the historic connections of migration and the shipping industry through New York, but of course, the more contemporary resonances of human movement and international trade in the world we now find ourselves in.”
About the Artist
Hughie O’Donoghue was born in Manchester, England in 1953 and now lives and works in London and Erris, Co Mayo, Ireland. O’Donoghue uses figuration and abstraction to explore themes of human identity, memory, and experience; and draws on history, mythology, and personal records to create works that resonate with emotional intensity.
He completed an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths in 1982 and was Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London from 1984-85. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from University College Cork, Ireland in 2005; and was elected to the Royal Academy in 2009 and Aosdána in 2013.
Major solo museum exhibitions include Haus der Kunst, Munich; Imperial War Museum, London; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Leeds City Art Gallery; DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague; The Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; and The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
His work is in public collections throughout the world including The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, and The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Ulster Museum, Belfast; British Museum, London; Dallas Museum of Art, Michigan Museum of Art, and Yale Center for British Art, USA.
For more information and interviews
Tracy Jones, Brera PR – tracy@brera-london.com / 01702 216658 / 0788751498
For sales inquiries
Clare O’Donoghue – clare.odonoghue@btinternet.com
