Artists

Brian O’Doherty

Press release

The new exhibition by Irish-American artist and author Brian O’Doherty (1928-2022) centres on his conceptual drawings from the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to their intellectual rigour, they are characterised above all by the fact that they undermine this at the perceptual level: through language, irony, aesthetic stimuli and physical-sensual experiences.

What kind of art can emerge if you are a bustling, clever and widely received theorist and critic at the same time? Do these practices amalgamate or is it possible to keep them separate? And if so, how? Does the art emerge to test the theory, or does the theory emerge from the art? Although we can no longer ask Brian O’Doherty these questions, we can try to answer them by looking at his artistic oeuvre.

O’Doherty was several things at once: doctor, editor, artist, Irishman, writer, critic, husband, theorist. He saw the challenge of living out manifold roles and reflected upon it. So it was not without reason that he coined four pseudonyms to keep the various fields of work with their different mindsets separate from one another. He left the art criticism in part to Mary Josephson, while Patrick Ireland took over Brian O’Doherty’s artistic practice from 1972 to 2008: the change in name, which took place in a performance of the same title (Name Change) was primarily politically motivated: it was due to the violent events in Northern Ireland, Bloody Sunday. After a period of peace, Patrick Ireland was ceremoniously buried in Dublin: The message here: identity is a construct, but for O’Doherty bound to very personal matters and his Irish homeland.