Irish painter takes a fresh look at UFO sightings with new exhibition
Print Edition
A small exhibition, entitled “Sightings,” by Irish painter Enda O’Donoghue has opened at Pantocrator Gallery in M50 Shanghai. Fourteen paintings based on photographs of UFO sightings in 1973 from various places around the world are on display through this week.
Using oils on canvas, O’Donoghue’s paintings turn old photo images into photo-realistic renderings complete with the blurry effect so common in UFO images.
According to O’Donoghue, 1973 was a bumper year for UFO sightings. Hundreds were reported that year throughout the United States and in many other countries across the world including Canada, Germany, Italy and Japan.
Some of these reports included tales of abductions, some with elaborate descriptions of humanoid like beings. Others included photographs purporting to show alien crafts or “flying saucers.”
However, in O’Donoghue’s paintings all traces of these mysterious crafts have been removed.
“It is a play on the ideas of ‘presence’ and ‘un-presence’,” said O’Donoghue, who has a computer science background. “The days when photos were used as evidence in support of statements are gone with the development of Photoshop.”
Born in 1973 in Limerick, Ireland, O’Donoghue has been living and working in Berlin since 2002.
He said his interest in UFOs began during his childhood when one day he found a newspaper his parents kept on the date of his birth. The paper included a report of “Mystery Craft” in the sky at Lemonfield, Patrickswell.
“For years, nobody could explain for sure whether what they saw was just a new type of plane or bursts of radio waves,” he said. “It might be a puzzle impossible to solve. But uncertainty is as uncertainty does. After all, 1973 also saw the launch of the first American Space Station. Since then, man’s search for aliens has never stopped.”
Over the years, O’Donoghue has taken part in numerous international group exhibitions. His work was previously shown in China at the Irish Pavilion at World Expo 2010. He said his projects would always be some combination of photography and painting.
“I think I sort of re-invented something in painting, in that it offers me an opportunity to paint the classic motifs in an unconventional way,” he said.
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