File:Valerie Hegarty FreshStart 2021.jpg

Installation by Valerie Hegarty, Fresh Start (The Covid Diaries Series) (wood, canvas, paper, glue, wire, tape, epoxy clay, dimensions variable, 2021). The image illustrates a key later body of work in Valerie Hegarty's career in the 2000s when she produced dark, illusionistic reliefs, self-contained sculptures and wall works, and installations. These works often depicted a dystopian vision of cracked, peeled, crumbling or rotting walls from urban subways or boarded up windows, often augmented with and blooming and dying flowers. The pictured installation, in Riverside Park, offered a large, decaying vanitas still-life painting of flowers leaning against a wall behind the bars of an Amtrak maintenance site that burst with a three-dimensional tangle of roots, leaves and blossoms spilling onto the floor. This work was publicly exhibited in prominent exhibitions, discussed in major art journals and daily press publications and commissioned by major art institutions.

Artist Valerie Hegarty. Copyright held by the artist.

Valerie Hegarty

Installation view

Yes

The image serves an informational and educational purpose as the primary means of illustrating a key late body of work in Valerie Hegarty's career in the 2020s: her dark, illusionistic reliefs, sculptures and wall works, which critics wrote, found beauty and wonder amid an intimate, dystopian vision of cracked, peeled, crumbling or rotting walls drawn from her surroundings, dying flowers or seemingly mutated, anthropomorphic fruit. These works included more self-contained pieces, both physically and thematically, as well as public and gallery installations. Because the article is about an artist and her work, the omission of the image would significantly limit a reader's understanding and ability to understand this later stage and body of work, which brought Hegarty ongoing recognition through exhibitions, commissions and coverage by major critics and publications. Hegarty's work of this type and this series is discussed in the article and by critics cited in the article.

There is no free equivalent of this or any other of this series by Valerie Hegarty, and the work no longer is viewable, so the image cannot be replaced by a free image.

The image will not affect the value of the original work or limit the copyright holder's rights or ability to distribute the original due to its low resolution and the general workings of the art market, which values the actual work of art. Because of the low resolution, illegal copies could not be made.