Darragh Huges

Daragh Hughes is an Irish artist based in Dublin, who graduated from the Dublin Institute of Technology in 2006. As a figurative painter, Daragh’s interest lies in the human body. His paintings exaggerate the nude and dramatically de-idealise the body, capturing moments of awkwardness, pain or elation. 

Daragh’s unwavering obsession with depicting the human form stems from an anger. Not an anger with the subject, but an anger based upon the assertion that a certain kind of ‘truth’ in art has all but been discarded or misplaced. For the most part, postmodernism has held irony and parody in higher esteem then the representation of ‘form’ or ‘narrative’. 

As such, Daragh’s paintings act as counter-point to a world obsessed with notions of the ‘contemporary’.  This 'notion of the contemporary' seemingly ignores the human universals that have sustained art throughout history, that is to say those of sex, death, truth and beauty.