David Hegarty

1 July—6 August 2008

In the Gallery Café

Brecon Beacon, 2008. Oil on linen, 58 x 51 cm.

David Hegarty graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 1998. He has been a frequent exhibitor in the Summer Exhibition for more than 10 years and his work is in collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Financial Services Authority and various private collections throughout the UK, Europe and the US.

Professor Maurice Cockrill RA, Keeper of the RA Schools, recalls Hegarty studying in the Schools in the late 1990s:

"I was very impressed by his profound level of commitment and the energy he brought to his painting practice... his approach to image making was positively on the vigorous expressive side, within the tradition of Rubens, Soutine and De Kooning. The imagery would be poised in balance, just one side of being openly explicit but always alluding to some lived experience, something glimpsed in the visible world, the true subject and drama of which was withheld and buried in the spirited, racing brushwork and in generous colour and impasto.

"The more recent works are a development of David’s earlier study and painting experience. Now the pictures are overtly landscape in theme and intention... the kind of lush, dense greenness that presses itself upon the senses. The work of Frank Auerbach comes to mind, his Primrose Hill paintings, but in David Hegarty there will rarely be something specific as a leaning tree, and all the variety of abundant nature is subsumed into a vibrant material whole composed of intense brushwork which carries much of the emotional charge of the image.

"These are rich paintings with great authority and reveal how much David Hegarty has accomplished only in one decade."

• Royal Academy of Arts