BLACK AND WHITE BY DARAGH HUGHES

The Sebastian Guinness Gallery is proud to present ‘Black and White’ the first major exhibition of paintings by emerging artist Daragh Hughes. Daragh is an Irish artist based in Dublin, who graduated from the Dublin Institute of Technology in 2006. As a figurative painter, Daragh’s interest lies in the human body. His paintings exaggerate the nude and dramatically de-idealise the body, capturing moments of awkwardness, pain or elation.

Daragh’s unwavering obsession with depicting the human form stems from an anger. Not an anger with the subject, but an anger based upon the assertion that a certain kind of ‘truth’ in art has all but been discarded or misplaced. For the most part, postmodernism has held irony and parody in higher esteem then the representation of ‘form’ or ‘narrative’.

As such, Daragh’s paintings act as counter-point to a world obsessed with notions of the ‘contemporary’.  This 'notion of the contemporary' seemingly ignores the human universals that have sustained art throughout history, that is to say those of sex, death, truth and beauty.  

Due to the scale of Daragh’s paintings the artist moved his studio into the Sebastian Guinness Gallery last month. The large-scale figurative pieces were painted on site in the gallery space, an unusual process for both artist and gallery, one which blurs the lines between the romantic ideal of the artist’s studio, and the gleaming white exhibition cube.   

Click Here to listen to Daragh Hughes discussing his work