Enda O’Donoghue – Berlin-based Irish contemporary artist

Enda O’Donoghue’s paintings arise from a forensic engagement with the debris of digital life. His work is a relentless excavation of discarded and overlooked images. It stands at the fracture point between abstraction and representation, between the encoded logic of the machine and the stubborn mortality of the hand.

Informed by an early background in computer programming, O’Donoghue approaches painting as a system. It is analytical, methodical, almost bureaucratic. He dissects and reconstructs. Within that system, failure and human error are not only tolerated, they are embraced. Errors, misalignments, glitches are not accidents but essential events, signs of a structure buckling under its own weight.

Working mainly from found photographs, video stills, and broken relics of personal and cultural memory, O’Donoghue reconstructs the in-between places and moments of modern life. He isolates the disposable: a pixelated blur, a corrupted file, a forgotten wall. He pulls them against the current of oblivion through the slow, stubborn, transformative act of painting.

The paintings are not restorations. They are collisions where fact merges with fiction, science with pseudoscience, evidence with invention. Analogue nostalgia meets digital loss.

In a world drowning in images, where memory has become weightless and endless, O’Donoghue’s paintings resist the flood. They slow time. They wound clarity. They make forgetting visible. Each work is a quiet, unheroic act of salvage, an attempt to pull something mortal, fallible, and human from the wreckage of speed and noise. They are paintings of systems already failing, made by a hand that refuses to let them simply vanish.

Enda O’Donoghue was born in Ireland and has been living and working in Berlin since 2002. He completed a degree in painting at the Limerick School of Art and Design followed by a Masters in Interactive Media at the University of Limerick.

O’Donoghue has exhibited widely in international group shows, including exhibitions at Sam & Adele Golden Gallery, New York; Pantocrátor Gallery, Shanghai; CHB, Berlin; Meter Room, Coventry; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; the 2010 Expo in Shanghai; Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin; Torrance Art Museum, California; Grimmmuseum, Berlin; Polarraum, Hamburg; and Overgaden, Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen.
Recent exhibitions include Mélange (Galerie Neurotitan, Berlin, 2024), Travels in Hyper Reality (Crane Visual, Cork, 2023), Tondo (Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin, 2020), and Alptraum (international touring project, 2018–2021).

His solo exhibitions have taken place in Berlin, Shanghai, New York, and Ireland. In 2012, his work was presented in a major solo exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art, and in 2014 he was awarded a Golden Foundation Residency in New York State. He has also curated a number of group exhibitions and has served as an external examiner for the Bachelors and Masters programs in Fine Art at the Limerick School of Art and Design.