Valerie Hegarty
Valerie Hegarty is a visual artist who creates paintings, sculptures, and installations that often address themes of memory, place and history. Informed by the current turbulent state of America while also excavating the country’s past, Hegarty often turns the gallery into a dramatic place of change. Her large-scale installation work incorporates a process she calls “reverse archeology,” in which layers of painted paper are adhered to the walls and floors of the gallery and then scraped back to create a material memory of a space. She also constructs canvases and sculptures that replicate paintings and antiques from early American art history from canvas, Foamcore, paint and papier-mâché only to falsify their ruination by devices associated with their historical significance.
Hegarty’s most recent series of ceramic and watercolor paintings, American Berserk, reflect a fevered, hallucinatory vision of American history examined through the prism of its visual artistic traditions. Still life paintings of fruit evoke the works of Raphaelle Peale, although hints of rot allude to the degradation of the bounty of the American landscape. Some individual arrangements of fruits are drained of vibrant colors, alluding to both the widespread practice of artificially ripening fruit in trucks with Ethylene gas and the …
Valerie Hegarty is a visual artist who creates paintings, sculptures, and installations that often address themes of memory, place and history. Informed by the current turbulent state of America while also excavating the country’s past, Hegarty often turns the gallery into a dramatic place of change. Her large-scale installation work incorporates a process she calls “reverse archeology,” in which layers of painted paper are adhered to the walls and floors of the gallery and then scraped back to create a material memory of a space. She also constructs canvases and sculptures that replicate paintings and antiques from early American art history from canvas, Foamcore, paint and papier-mâché only to falsify their ruination by devices associated with their historical significance.
Hegarty’s most recent series of ceramic and watercolor paintings, American Berserk, reflect a fevered, hallucinatory vision of American history examined through the prism of its visual artistic traditions. Still life paintings of fruit evoke the works of Raphaelle Peale, although hints of rot allude to the degradation of the bounty of the American landscape. Some individual arrangements of fruits are drained of vibrant colors, alluding to both the widespread practice of artificially ripening fruit in trucks with Ethylene gas and the way in which blood might drain from a viewer’s face if confronted by a ghost. Hegarty’s still life watercolor paintings also invoke the 17th-century notion of Vanitas, wherein depictions of fruit and vegetables represent the organic nature of human existence, with overripeness and rot intimating human mortality and ultimate demise. Correlations between the lifecycles of fruit and those of humans recur in the ceramic work. Glazed ceramic carrots, bananas, and cucumbers appear to come to life in humorous and sinister ways, inspired by news reports of genetic modifications of crops that have gone awry. Cloaked within allusions to American classicism and evocations of the decorative and ornamental traditions, Hegarty’s work consistently interrogates the darker ramifications of the American Experiment.
Hegarty’s solo exhibitions include Nicelle Beauchene in NY, Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea, Locust Projects in Miami, Museum 52 in London, The MCA in Chicago, and Guild & Greyshkul in NY, among others including a commission for a public sculpture on the High Line in New York and her most recent show of site-specific installations in The Brooklyn Museum’s period rooms. Selected group exhibitions in New York include Artists Space, The Drawing Center, D’Amelio Terras Gallery, Derek Eller, White Columns and MoMA PS1. Hegarty has been awarded numerous grants through foundations such as the Pollock Krasner Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, and Campari NY. Residencies include LMCC, Marie Walsh Sharpe, PS 122, MacDowell, Yaddo and Smack Mellon. Hegarty was the first Andrew W. Mellon Arts and the Common Good Artist-in-Residence at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey from 2014-2015.
