Peres Projects, Berlin Private Collection, United Kingdom
Catalogue Essay
Mark flood once described one of his exhibitions as the ‘humorous look at the plight of the contemporary artist.’ This self deprecating view on his own work typifies an artist who has purposefully shunned much of the growing interest surrounding him. Conflicted about being acclaimed as an artist and yet very much not wanting to be part of the world which consumes his art has seen the artist’s approach vary a great deal - from visiting the mass produced and his critique of consumer and celebrity culture in America, to labouring over the beautifully exquisite. The present lot forms part of this latter body of work in which the artist lays lace on the canvas, building up colour over this layer and subsequently tearing it away to produce a vivid and intricate patternation. Inspired by Dave Hickey's 1993 book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, which calls for the reconsideration of beauty and the pleasure of art dismissing the generic concept of beauty as naïve, the artist explains his departure from his earlier visit to consumerist low brow advertising to these latter objects of beauty: ‘Hickey made me realize that I made ugly art…But that’s what I thought art was about—if you made something beautiful, you were suspect. … When I discovered how to make something beautiful, I no longer needed any art bureaucracy.’
