Radix
Valerie Hegarty (born 1967) is an American painter, sculptor, and installation artist. 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. 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). 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. 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, MoMA PS1, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), and Artists Space. She has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, among others. Her work belongs to institutional collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Portland Museum of Art, Perez Art Museum, and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. She is based between New York City and Sullivan County, New York.