Brian O'Doherty
, Irish, 1928-2022
Title
Ogham on BroadwayDate2003
MediumAcrylic on canvas
Dimensions
183 x 189 x 5 cm
Credit LinePurchased, the Artist, 2019
Object numberNGI.2019.199
DescriptionBrian O’Doherty qualified as a medical doctor in Ireland before embarking in the late 1950s on a lengthy career as artist, critic, writer, filmmaker, and educator. During the 1960s, he became a pioneering conceptual artist in New York, and could include among his immediate circle such contemporaries as Sol Le Witt, Dan Graham, Eve Hesse and Robert Smithson. In the following decade, he established himself as a prominent proponent of installation art. An intellectual and instinctive theorist, O’Doherty has always been inclined towards producing art that addresses such concerns as aesthetic discourse, history, language, the self and art institutions. He has dealt regularly in his work with the role of the institution in the display, promotion and elevation of art.'Name Change' (1972), O’Doherty’s first performance work, marked the artist’s adoption of a distinct artistic persona, Patrick Ireland. The artist retained this guise, a protest against the killing of civil rights marchers in Derry, until 2008, when he held a symbolic burial of an effigy of Patrick Ireland in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. O’Doherty’s other alter egos include Mary Josephson, under which he contributed to 'Art in America'.
He has maintained contact with Ireland since his emigration, and in 1977, with James Coleman, became one of the first Irish artists to be admitted to the Rosc exhibition.
The critical role of drawing in O’Doherty’s practice was embodied in the artist’s wall paintings and distinctive installations, called 'Rope Drawings'. These latter works, which draw on architectural, musical, scientific and literary, as well as pictorial traditions, invite the viewer to enter into and participate in the artwork, and blur the lines between inside and outside.
O’Doherty has exhibited widely in the United States and Ireland, and is represented in permanent collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Centre George Pompidou; Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane; and IMMA. O’Doherty continues to live and work in New York.
With works like 'Ogham on Broadway', O’Doherty appropriated the ancient Irish script to an American, New World context. The script, which consists solely of lines arranged in four registers, complemented the minimalism that underpinned much of conceptual art being produced in New York at the time. The artist was struck by Ogham’s formal and linguistic dimensions, in particular the linear relationships between the vowels. The painting also references clearly Piet Mondrian’s celebrated 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' (1942-1943), which was presented to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943.