Lot 20A Hughie O'Donoghue

Hughie O'Donoghue b.1953 - **ADDITIONAL LOT** COURSE OF THE DIVER I Oil on linen canvas, 69'' x 95'' (175 x 241.5cm), signed, inscribed and dated 2002 verso. Provenance: The Rubicon Gallery, Dublin where acquired by the present owner. Literature: Painting, Memory, Myth by James Hamilton, published by Merrall page 32 (Illustrated); Irish Arts Review, Summer 2003 Volume 20 No. 2 (illustrated front cover). The course of the diver series in 2002 was exhibited in Purdy Hicks Gallery, London, as well as Gallery Karl Pfefferle, Munich. For the many admirers of O'Donoghue's work ''The Course of the Diver Series'' showed the artist at the height of his powers. In the catalogue entry to the Purdy Hicks Exhibition of O'Donoghue's works entitled ''Fiume'' (2004) Sue Hubbard writes: ''In Course of the Diver I and II, 2002, the figure transmutes into a swimmer. Amid black waters set against a backdrop of deep ochres and oranges, smudged with patches of dirty yellow suggestive of the glare and sulphurous smoke of some distant battle field, the figure swims half- submerged so that we can only guess at whether he is drowning or struggling to reach the far shore. It is these expressions of suffering, of struggle, of half- submerged memories that O'Donoghue weaves into his courageous paintings to form complex psychological maps. At once both gorgeous and lush- with their deep blues, ochres and oxblood reds, their dense blacks and their glazed surfaces- they are also, in the true Romantic sense of the word, awe inspiring. Images rise to the surface like his divers slipping through dark water, like ghosts, like photographs finding form in developing solution''