Installation View: Schalter Gallery, Berlin, Germany | Exhibition: D E S T R O Y MODERN ART, Maurice Doherty (2009)
Installation View: Schalter Gallery, Berlin, Germany | Exhibition: D E S T R O Y MODERN ART, Maurice Doherty (2008)
PEDESTAL
Format: firebricks, carjack
Date: 2009
Pedestal – is a sculpture, where a tower of firebricks was placed on a car jack on the floor of the gallery. The carjack was used to hydraulically wedge the bricks between the ceiling and the floor. The jack was positioned so that visitors to the exhibition, if they desired, could crank it down to destroy the sculpture and leave a ‘pile of bricks’.
Schalter is pleased to announce D E S T R O Y MODERN ART an exhibition by Glasgow/Berlin based artist Maurice Doherty.
In his exhibition at Schalter, Doherty employs a variety of techniques – lens based, sculptural and two dimensional – to find urgency in the established methods and conventions of 20th Century Art. Treating seminal artworks as an available vocabulary to be fragmented, misappropriated, vandalized, stolen or otherwise transgressed, Doherty brings a conceptual approach – such as applying Piet Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism to the streets of Belfast or lifting fetishized images from the internet – to bear on the interplay of conflicts like morality and culture or beauty and the banal.
The theme of destruction has often featured in Doherty’s art. Having received the New Work Scotland Award in Edinburgh in 2003, Doherty’s exhibition at the Collective Gallery titled ‘Mass Destruction’ consisted of a gas cooker, canister and burning candle. The installation gave visitors to the exhibition the opportunity to turn on the gas and obliterate the gallery. In a more recent artwork, ‘Searching for My Soul’, Doherty is documenting the destruction and regeneration of the cells in his body over a sixteen-year period, at which point he will be physically made up of new matter.
Press Release: D E S T R O Y MODERN ART, Schalter Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2009)
