Through the Forbidden City Painting

Born and now living in County Cork Ireland. www.michaelhegarty.com Originally graduating in fine art from the Crawford School of Art Cork in 1981, my work instinctively reflected the art ideas of the time represented by movements such as firstly The Pictures Generation and then Neo-Geometric Conceptualism. Today I see my work grounded in concepts originating in these movements. Neo-Geo artists created artworks that were influenced by the style of earlier developments in twentieth century art –such as Minimalism, Pop Art, and Hardedge Abstraction. Grace Glueck, one of the key documenters of the movement, notes “The painters among the Neo-Geo movement consciously recycled geometric motifs of the 1960's and 70's in their canvases, but put them to new use, regarding their geometry as referential rather than abstract.” My paintings explore formalist abstraction through a post-pop/post-modern lens. On the one hand they seek universal truths, each painting is a manifestation of what is… a specimen of existence. On the other hand, from a pop art sensibility the paintings explore the topographic nuances of consumer culture, the vagaries of taste in the use of found fabrics from domestic interiors and the rotations of fashion and obsolescence. The oval format I use underlines the physicality of my paintings, which rely on a subtle rather than an impasto form of expression. It also references the quaintness of modernist abstraction; the utopian belief in new promises and shapes of the future, a future that certainly cannot be taken for granted any more.