Enda O’Donoghue – Berlin-based Irish contemporary artist
Enda O’Donoghue’s work presents a forensic interest into the construction, the language and the mediated world of digital images together with an ongoing dialogue with the medium and process of painting. Hovering between the realms of abstraction and representation, between the mathematical encoded and the organic, O’Donoghue’s paintings are the result of a process which is highly analytical and methodical and yet inviting of errors, misalignments and glitches. The source material for most of his work comes from found images and other media where he plays with seemingly random throwaway moments of everyday life or forgotten relics of cultural or personal significance. These are translated, reconfigured and merging together in various interconnected themes, building towards narratives made up of these disparate elements and fragments, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, science and pseudoscience, evidence and invention. A major interest throughout his recent work is an exploration the nostalgic qualities of analogue media from the past now filtered and experienced through the veil of digital technology of the present. In O’Donoghue’s work, the painterliness of his technique works with the disposable nature of his subjects to make the work sometimes poignant and melancholic, or alternatively brittle and harsh. His work is deeply influenced by the digital high speed reality we now live in and he transports these seemingly meaningless sound-bite images from a place of apparent futility to one that questions and searches for meaning through the transformative act of painting.
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 taken part in numerous international group exhibitions, including shows at Sam & Adele Golden Gallery, NY, USA (2015), Pantocrátor Gallery, Shanghai (2015), CHB, Berlin (2014), Meter Room, Coventry (2012), The Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2011), Expo in Shanghai (2010), Universal Cube, Leipzig (2008), Four Gallery, Dublin (2006), Overgaden, Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2006) and a number of solo shows in Berlin, Shanghai, New York and Ireland. In 2012 his work was presented in a major solo exhibition at the Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ireland and in 2014 he was awarded a residency at the Golden Foundation in New York state. He has also curated a number of group exhibitions, most recently an exhibition presenting a selection of Berlin based Irish artists at Grimmmuseum in Berlin which toured to the Galway Arts Centre, Ireland in 2013.