The exhibition of Hughie O’Donoghue’s work, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, demonstrates that the figure has finally emerged triumphant, writes Mic Moroney
Inevitably, the word that springs to mind to describe Hughie O’Donoghue’s work is painterly: the sheer scale and physicality of his canvases, the big billowy colourscapes, the obsessional attention to rich, gestural surfaces. It’s probably because, despite a thirty-year exhibition career across Europe, he is partly defined here by the momentous Passion series he exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1999.
