- Venue
- Swiss Cottage Gallery
- Starts
- Thursday, August 12, 2021
- Ends
- Friday, October 1, 2021
- Address
- Swiss Cottage Gallery (inside Swiss Cottage Library) 88 Avenue Road London, NW3 3HA
- Location
- London
- Organiser
- Swiss Cottage Gallery
Swiss Cottage Gallery and Camden Council proudly presents a solo exhibition of London based Irish artist Joe Duggan titled Material. Working in an interdisciplinary manner across sculpture, installation, video, photography and painting, this exhibition will premiere Duggan’s latest body of work and focus on his sculptural practice demonstrating a keen interest in exploring both metaphysical and material qualities. With an egalitarian approach to materials, Duggan combines recycled and reflective metals with reclaimed wood, cast concrete and moulded plaster to create sculptural constructions through assemblage and juxtaposition. The salvaging of materials, which are often re-appropriated from other artists’ studios, follows in a lineage of postmodernist or Arte povera approaches by reusing humble, everyday and throwaway materials. The structures Duggan has assembled come from multiple references: forms that we encounter through urban/rural architectures; figuration; troupes from art-historical predecessors. These objects and their foundations become metaphors that reveal but also confound any sense of knowing or familiarity.There is a deliberate joyful ambiguity and elements of humour at play in how we may read the work or in its production. The materials employed may have waited in the artist’s studio or even have been discarded by another to be juxtaposed and harmonised into new symbiotic relationships that resist categorisation.
In this body of work, like in previous projects Duggan questions the role of the artist and how throughout the art historical context has challenged, value systems, representation and roles in society. The works in this exhibition are also concerned with perceptions of progress both socially and individually represented by advancements in the built environment design and nods to architectural typologies and approaches. The exhibition is presented within the modernist architecture of The Swiss Cottage Library, originally built as a civic complex, brings new readings to the works, and the sculptures’ references to modernism, urban environments, architectural forms, and ideas of civil values.
The exhibition is curated by Séamus McCormack.
www.joeduggan.co.uk
