In this exhibition, Hegarty takes her point of departure from themes of consumption, lust, reproduction and greed. Playing with traditional still life and figurative painting, Hegarty cites as inspiration the cult comedy Little Shop of Horrors along with current news headlines concerning the enhancement and mutilation of body and food. These four new paintings metamorphose sculpturally, as the paintings burst, grow and propagate in bodily gestures, leading the overgrowth to travel ominously beyond the canvas boundaries.

Recalling a floral painting by Dutch painter Jan Davidsz de Heem, Hegarty’s Flower Frenzy pays homage to the first of these still lifes during the early 1600s, when it was cheaper to buy a painting of flowers than to actually have the real thing. Paralleling the rampant insatiability of the flower market at that time, where a highly inflated market was followed by a devastating crash—flourishing, fecund blossoms swell and multiply off the canvas, growing increasingly misshapen as they advance along the wall, threatening to consume neighboring paintings.

In Watermelon Tongue, Hegarty anthropomorphizes a common 19th Century still life through a long, tongue-like form that protrudes from a partially eaten wedge of watermelon. The piece takes its inspiration from the recent phenomenon of exploding watermelons in China where crops were sprayed with the wrong growth hormones causing the insides to grow faster than the outsides. The watermelon appears to mock or salivate over the nearby portrait, Girl in White with Flowers as the appendage swells away from the canvas, and leers at the painting. The cumulative effect of the work in the exhibition goes further than to just taunt, it gloats in the face of the viewer, pointing the blame of pandemic avarice and desire back to mankind.

Valerie Hegarty received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. She has shown internationally including solo shows at Guild & Greyshkul, New York; MUSEUM 52, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Depart Foundation, Rome; The Drawing Center, New York and White Columns, New York. Additionally Hegarty will have a solo project at the Brooklyn Museum in Spring 2013. This will be the artist’s second solo show at the gallery.