The Oliver Sears Gallery is pleased to announce the second exhibition of new work by Hughie O’Donoghue.

Gort Rua is a cycle of fifteen paintings that are situated in Erris, northwest Co. Mayo, the land of his mother’s family and a constant presence in the artist’s life. O’Donoghue’s practice is centred on memory. Often the memories that are inherited, stories handed down from generations now disappeared, are more vivid than his own. Thus the focus of each multi-layered work become the search for a time or a feeling for a place.

The artist writes: Rather than making topographical landscapes I wanted to make paintings that are about how memory and place in particular are held within the imagination so that the pictures are more about how the place would feel rather than just how it might look. I remembered Erris as a mysterious and magical place as a child and this is what I wanted to convey in the painting.

Taking the exhibition as a single experience, the viewer is transported into O’Donoghue’s imagined, remembered and recreated childhood in a part of Ireland known more for its suffering during the Famine and its consequential mass emigration. It is particularly heartening that Gort Rua is concerned with discovery rather than the wretched history of loss.

Hughie O’Donoghue was born in Manchester, England, although many of his early summers were spent in Bangor Erris, North-west Mayo, from where his mother had reluctantly emigrated in 1937. The stark Irish scenery with its accompanying sense of tragedy, derived from the days of The Great Famine, found later expression in O'Donoghue's art.

O'Donoghue became a dedicated student of art, studying drawing and painting at Goldsmiths' College, University of London, and since then has been exhibiting his work in a variety of international solo and group exhibitions, gradually evolving a style of art all of his own. His painterly skills, together with his research into his subjects, has enabled him to produce a highly acclaimed body of work, several prestigious awards (including an honorary doctorate from University College Cork) and a distinguished reputation, not least for his masterful expression of human suffering. He has exhibited widely in the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Holland, Australia, and the USA. Hughie was elected as a member of the Royal Academy in 2009.

A fully illustrated catalogue will be available for this exhibition.