06 Jun 2009

Destroy Modern Art at Schalter, Berlin

Schalter is pleased to announce D E S T R O Y M o d e r n A r t  , 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, lifting fetishized images from the internet or setting up potentially dangerous situations in the gallery – to bear upon the interplay of conflicts between 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.

Born in Ireland in 1972, Doherty graduated from the University of Ulster, Belfast, in 1997 and completed a Masters in Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art, in 2001. Recent solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at the Futures Gallery, Glasgow Science Centre, as part of the Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art (2008), Catalyst Arts, Belfast (2006), The Floating Series, Berlin (2006) and Tramway, Glasgow (2006). Recent group shows include 'Last Chance Salon' - Glasgow Project Room (2009), 'Wanted Duchamps' at D'Ailleurs - Volapuk/Ici&La, Berlin (2008) and 'Ghost Riders' at Kunsthaus Erfurt (2008).

Schalter is a non-commercial platform for the conception of art and exhibition making. The space was founded on a belief that the exhibition can also exist as an artwork, and seeks to question traditional divisions between artist and curator, exhibition and discrete individual artwork, and how we understand context, meaning and author. The space was founded in October 2006.