Valerie Hegarty (born 1967) is an American painter, sculptor, and installation artist.Sholis, Brian. "Valerie Hegarty," Artforum, March 2005. Retrieved August 13, 2022.Hall, Emily. "Valerie Hegarty," Artforum, December 2006. Retrieved August 13, 2022. She is known for irreverent, often critical works that replicate canonical paintings, furnishings, and architectural spaces from American or personal history undergoing various processes of transformation.Barliant, Claire. "Valerie Hegarty," Art in America, September 2010. Retrieved August 16, 2022.Reisenfeld, Robin. "Valerie Hegarty," Sculpture, December 2010.Johnson, Ken. "Valerie Hegarty: 'Cosmic Collisions,'" The New York Times, March 25, 2010. Retrieved August 13, 2022. Hegarty most often portrays her recreations in meticulously realized, trompe l’oeil states of decay, ruin, or physical attack related to their circumstances (e.g., a seascape pierced by harpoons, a still life of food being eaten by crows).Steinhauer, Jillian. "Valerie Hegarty," The New York Times, December 19, 2018. Retrieved August 13, 2022.Rossetti, Halo. "Valerie Hegarty," Artforum, April 2012. Retrieved August 13, 2022.Davis, Ben. "The Armory Bowl," Artnet, March 10, 2006. Retrieved August 16, 2022. Her work examines American historical themes involving colonization, slavery, Manifest Destiny, nationalism, art-historical movements and their ideological tenets, romantic conceptions of nature, and environmental degradation.Harrington-Johnson, Heidi. "Valerie Hegarty at Burning in Water," Artforum, October 2016. Retrieved August 13, 2022.Desmarais, Charles. "Optimism is opening an art gallery, and its name is Burning in Water," San Francisco Chronicle, April 27, 2018. Retrieved August 18, 2022.Mendelson, Meredith. "Paper Pushers," ARTnews, May 2007, p. 150. Sculpture critic Robin Reisenfeld wrote that among other things, Hegarty's art is "informed by 19th-century American landscape painting as an expression of the sublime, as well as by the manufacturing of two-dimensional 'masterworks' to be destroyed in three-dimensional fashion in order to evoke entropic forces of growth and decay."
Hegarty has exhibited at venues including the Brooklyn Museum,The New Yorker. "Period Piece," May 20, 2013. Retrieved August 16, 2022. MoMA PS1,Gilman, Claire. "Valerie Hegarty," Greater New York, New York: MoMA PS1, 2005. Retrieved August 19, 2022. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA),Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Valerie Hegarty, Exhibitions. Retrieved August 16, 2022. and Artists Space.Mansoor Jaleh. "On Being an Exhibition – Artists Space Exhibitions," Artforum, February 2008. Retrieved August 13, 2022. She has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation,Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Valerie Hegarty, Artists. Retrieved August 16, 2022. Adolph and Esther Gottlieb FoundationAdolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. "2022 Individual Support Grant Recipients." Retrieved August 19, 2022. and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation,Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Valerie Hegarty, Award Winners. Retrieved August 16, 2022. among others. Her work belongs to institutional collections including the Brooklyn Museum,Vogel, Carol. "Metropolitan Museum Finds a Bald Man," The New York Times, January 21, 2010. Retrieved August 16, 2022. Hood Museum of Art,Hood Museum of Art. 2018–19 Hood Museum of Art Annual Report, Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 2019. Portland Museum of Art,Portland Art Museum. Warped Clipper Ship, 2016 Collection. Retrieved August 22, 2022. Perez Art Museum, and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.Malin Gallery. Valerie Hegarty: Gone Viral, New York: Malin Gallery, 2021. She is based between New York City and Sullivan County, New York.
Education and early career Hegarty was born in 1967 in Burlington, Vermont. She received a BA in studio art from Middlebury College in 1989 and a BFA in illustration from the Academy of Art College in San Francisco in 1995, before undertaking graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, 2002).Smack Mellon. Valerie Hegarty, Studio Artists. Retrieved August 16, 2022. After graduating, she exhibited in group shows at the Bronx Museum of Art,Genocchio, Benjamin. "A Chance to Fill Up on Visual Treats," The New York Times, April 25, 2004. Retrieved August 13, 2022. Drawing Center,Falkenstein, Michelle. "Never Mind About Pencils," ARTnews, November 2004. Smack Mellon, MoMA PS1, White ColumnsKimmelman, Michael. "Inspiration from Real Estate Rejects," The New York Times, September 9, 2005. Retrieved August 16, 2022., and Artists Space, and solo exhibitions at MCA Chicago (2003) and Guild & Greyshkul (2005, 2006), among others. Her later solo exhibitions have taken place at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery,Meier, Allison. "Three LES Shows Reveal a World of Hidden Details," Hyperallergic, September 20, 2012. Marlborough Chelsea and Malin Gallery in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, Burning in Water (New York and San Francisco), and Locust Projects (Miami),Sharkey, Alix. "Miami’s Big Art Experiment," Plum Miami, May 2011. among others.
Hegarty is also a writer—her story "Cats vs. Cancer" was published in the New England Review in 2019 and won a PEN America Dau Prize in 2020 for short story debut.Catapult. "A Conversation With Best Debut Short Stories 2020 Author Valerie Hegarty," September 14, 2020. Retrieved August 22, 2022.Hegarty, Valerie. "Cats vs. Cancer," New England Review, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2019. Retrieved August 22, 2022.
Work and reception Hegarty's best-known works are painting-sculptures and installations that employ trompe l’oeil construction—often layering paper, cardboard, cloth, papier-mâché and paint on objects, walls and floors—which she then peels, degrades or attacks through various means. She has described the combined process as "reverse archaeology," and it mirrors her interest in the mutative energy of growth, decay and regeneration.Schwendener, Marta. "Crowdsourced Exhibition Looks Kind of Familiar," The New York Times, January 2, 2013. Her process involves careful attention to the material effects of destructive forces (rot, overgrown nature, fire, dilapidation), producing surprising juxtapositions: weathered, damaged and aging environments integrated into pristine gallery spaces; violent forces unleashed into opulent period rooms; romantic landscapes come to life with sprouting leaves and branches.Bedard, Matthew. "Valerie Hegarty: Nature’s Methodic and Unpredictable Fury," Flaunt Magazine, August 2009.
Early installations Hegarty's early work explored architecture, artifice, ephemerality and memory, often by resurrecting physical environments of the past through a process of layering illusionistic imagery on paper and then peeling it to expose strata—as in an archeological diagram—evoking senses of nostalgia, displacement, mortality, or emergent repressed forces.Gitlen, Laurel. "Use and Abuse, Art and Aftermath," Hotel Lobby, West Loop, Chicago: University of Illinois at Chicago, 2002. Two works created in Chicago—Hotel Lobby, West Loop (Gallery 400, 2002) and Green Bathroom (MCA Chicago, 2003)—partially transformed gallery spaces, respectively, into an aging downtown hotel and a recreation of her studio bathroom in a future state of neglect. For "Play Pen" (Drawing Center, 2004), she created a to-scale rendition of the perimeter of her childhood bedroom that over the course of the exhibition she peeled away, revealing layers of yellow, periwinkle blue and bubblegum pink representing iterations of the room’s décor.
In the subsequent works, Rosebush (for Gordon Matta Clark) (White Columns, 2005) and Landscaping: PS1 Greater New York (MoMA PS1, 2005), Hegarty created tableaux of nature erupting out of exhibition spaces.Princenthal, Nancy. "Reinvesting in Fake Estates," Art in America, January 2006. Her New York solo-exhibition debut, "Landscaping" (Guild & Greyshkul, 2005), featured three works collapsing exterior and interior views, including a woodland idyll of leaves, branches and a decrepit log cabin emerging from the gallery’s white walls; Artforum'''s Brian Sholis deemed it an escapist work that "partly literalized the environmentalist fantasy of nature triumphantly overpowering the built realm," while demonstrating "that every site has its history."
Later work In the mid-2000s, Hegarty began creating irreverent painting-sculptures that replicated renowned still-lifes, landscapes and portraits (e.g., by Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church and Gilbert Stuart) only to destroy them through detailed simulations of decay and various assaults.Smith, Roberta. "In These Shows, the Material is the Message," The New York Times, August 10, 2007. Retrieved August 13, 2022. Critics suggested that these works "gently ribbed art historical precedents" such as 19th-century expressions of the sublime and challenged both romantic attachments to Americana and the legacy of the nation's "whitewashed history."Laster, Paul. "Valerie Hegarty: Altered States," Time Out New York, May 3–9, 2012. Reviews described the paper assemblage Still Lives with Crows (2006)—a tableau of crows tearing bloody hunks of meat out of a still life depicting a steak and vegetables—as "a picture of image culture cannibalizing itself," conveying amusement and a "Poe-like eeriness."Baron, Reuben M. and Joan Boykoff Baron. "The 2006 New York Armory Show," Artcritical, June 2006.
In her solo exhibitions "Seascape" (2006), "View From Thanatopsis" (2007) and "Altered States" (2012), Hegarty took over gallery spaces "in kudzu-like fashion," with simulations of shipwrecked and decimated paintings and Colonial furniture, sculptural debris and rot, and plants emerging from fissures in walls and floors.Sumpter, Helen. "Valerie Hegarty," Time Out London, April 23, 2007.Viveros-Faune, Christian. "Valerie Hegarty: Ruin Me," The Village Voice, April 18, 2012. "Seascape's" centerpiece was Overseas (Fireplace with Harpoons), a recreated Federalist-era fireplace, stuck full of harpoons and spattered with simulated tar, slime, mold, and seagull droppings that emanated from a harpoon wound in a reworking of the Church landscape The Icebergs (1861) hung over the mantel. Artforum's Emily Hall wrote that the show portrayed the ocean as an "enormous engine of decay"—a retort to "artists who have sought to frame nature as something over which man has prevailed with moral authority" and to over-estimations of the timelessness of America's colonial values. "View From Thanatopsis" included walls peppered with bullet holes, an armoire eaten to bits, a painting of the Grand Canyon split by a crack tearing through wall and floor, and a burnt, battered and doubled-over replication of Church's 1857 painting, Niagara.