Valerie Hegarty

[9][10][11] 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.

[32][3][10] 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.

[33][13] 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.

"[1] 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.

"[37] In her solo exhibitions "Seascape" (2006), "View From Thanatopsis" (2007) and "Altered States" (2012), Hegarty took over gallery spaces "in kudzu-like fashion,"[5] with simulations of shipwrecked and decimated paintings and Colonial furniture, sculptural debris and rot, and plants emerging from fissures in walls and floors.

[2] 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.

[43][5][4] Critics suggested works such as Starry Rothko (2010)—a charred, crumpled barely stable canvas altered by apparent space travel—addressed and spoofed solemn notions of cosmic evolution and modernist transcendence, genius and purity.

[27] In "American Berserk," Hegarty introduced surreal, anthropomorphic ceramic sculptures: rotting, wounded, seemingly smiling watermelon wedges resting on a plinth whose pink flesh resembled gums and growing teeth, tongues and ribs; "edibles-as-people" portraits (e.g., Fruit Face, 2015); and lumpy topiary busts of George Washington.

[6] In 2021, Hegarty took a similar approach in an installation in Riverside Park, Fresh Start, which offered a large, decaying vanitas still-life painting of flowers leaning against a wall behind the bars of an Amtrak maintenance site, which burst with a three-dimensional tangle of roots, leaves and blossoms spilling onto the floor.