GIAF Commissioned Exhibition

Hughie O’Donoghue 'One Hundred Years and Four Quarters'


Hughie O’Donoghue is one of Ireland’s leading international artists. He was elected as a member of the Royal Academy, London in 2009 and to Aosdána in 2013.

In these new works, as in previous bodies of work, Hughie O’Donoghue has drawn on his own experience and connections, people that he knew or knew of.

O’Donoghue has structured the content of these works into four distinct pathways, four quarters; he likens this to the four difering accounts of a murder in Kurosawa’s 1951 film Rashomon. In the film the murder of a Samurai is recounted by four characters; a bandit, the Samurai’s wife, his own ghost and a woodcutter. Their stories are mutually contradictory and self serving.

A hundred years on from the events of the 1916 Easter rising the four characters O’Donoghue has evoked in these new works are the revolutionary, the soldier, the sailor and the peasant. Through their difering perspectives the events of 1916 are alluded to in an attempt to explore the subjective and fugitive nature of truth. This exhibition forms part of the oficial Ireland 2016 Centenary Programme.