Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 25th September 2024

48 34 HUGHIE O’DONOGHUE RA (B.1953) No. 37, Stuttgart 7 Hours 20 Minutes 24.7.44 (2008) Oil on canvas,112 x 133cm (44 x 52.5”) Provenance: With Solomon Gallery, Dublin, 2008 where purchased by the present owner € 30,000 - 50,000 Originally exhibited at the James Hyman Gallery in London in 2008, No 37, Stuttgart 7 Hours 20 Minutes 24.7.44 is one of a series of paintings referring to the experience of the crews of pathfinder bomber aircraft operating from England during the Second World War, and indeed the general subject of war as a tragically destructive human enterprise. O’Donoghue had made several series of works drawing on his father’s experiences in the British Army during the war years, reflecting on lives of those who find themselves unwittingly caught up in the tide of history: both his parents had em- igrated from Ireland to England. His own and his parents’ backgrounds were by no means uncommon. He happened to discover that Paul McGuinness had been born on an RAF base in Germany. His father, Philip, a Liverpudlian whose mother had come from Co Kerry, had commanded a pathfinder squadron during the war. O’Donoghue delved into the history of 35 Squadron and thought about the experi- ences of the young men who found themselves risking and often losing their lives in a deadly war of attrition against Germany, both sides using every available technology to deliver destruction and death. Thinking about this, he happened one evening on an austere looking, battered volume in a secondhand bookshop, a complex 1920s treatise on maths and physics. The title, The Geometry of Paths , gripped him, and he applied it to a series of works as he consulted a navigator’s wartime logbook carefully documenting a series of pathfinding missions in 1944, routes meticulously calculated to mark venerable locations - not alone Stuttgart but also Berlin, Cologne and more - for the massed bombers following the pathfinders. In this fine painting, with its epic, ominous sweep, the unwieldy but inexorable Lan- caster aircraft (“big sheds with wings” as the artist put it) sets the absolute darkness of night ablaze, like some mythical vessel at the edge of eternity. Based between North Mayo and London, O’Donoghue is renowned for his painterly explorations of the human subject in the modern world, delving into questions of identity, memory and moral responsibility. His work draws on historical documenta- tion and archives, myth and personal experience. It is included in numerous Irish and international collections. Aidan Dunne, August 2024