Lot 23 Hughie O'Donoghue

Hughie O'Donoghue, b.1953 ARNO Oil on canvas, 45 3/4'' x 59'' (116.2 x 149.8cm), signed; signed, inscribed and dated 2004 verso. 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, 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''