Artnews.org: Hannah Dougherty

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Hannah Dougherty

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Jealous and grieving, 2005,
pencil, latex, acrylic, dirt on cotton, 195 x 195 cm

PICTURES THAT SHOW BUT DON'T TELL
(Hannah Dougherty)

Locating the work of Hannah Dougherty requires imagination. It is not Surrealism or Pop Art, or even Post-Pop as it has sometimes been called. It shares with the first a propensity towards the bringing together of distant realities, as an earthbound creature such as a stag and donkey clearly do not have wings no more than they have the ability to fly. Also, the sometimes near classical iconographic contents of Dougherty's paintings do not share in any of the delight for consumerism, the celebration of the commonplace and consumption indicative of Pop Art, anymore than they are a literal ironic commentary on late capitalist consumerism which the ideas around Post-Pop have sought to promulgate. What they do possess and share with these three movements and artistic trends, however, is the love and freedom of the collage, be it through reusing found materials, found images, or found ideas, and that such sources can somehow be re-directed towards generating different and extendable meanings.
The unique aspect of Dougherty's approach to painting as collage is fascinating not because it supposes the real of the collage (the material and substantive reality of something taken from the world), the conventional signifier to signified as sign, but because she retains a sense of detached but undefined symbolic association. They still possess of course the power to signify (to show), but they at the same deny the possibility of immediate gratification exposed by that which is purported to be the signified (to tell). There is a slippage between that which conveyed to the viewer, and the consequence for viewer who has to generate their own form of narrative construction. In a certain sense a doubled imaginative fiction is presented, the fiction created by the artist and derived from the real (sources, like picture books of bird houses, emblems, archaic motifs, etc), that which is traceable (pun intended) like the hand drawn elements, and that which has to be made anew though the discontinuous chain of association to which the viewer has no immediate access.
That Dougherty dares to use an a-chronic iconography, knowing quotations from multifarious sources and time periods, is where her work does at least to some extent abut up against certain considerations that might be called Post-Pop. But then her juxtaposition of ideas is sometimes so abstruse as to deliberately undercut an easy assimilation of the iconography she has adopted and becomes largely satirical. For example a book on the history of the life and breeding of canaries, or even the stylised development and anthropocentrism of bird boxes, serves the purposes of simple hilarity, that is by sending up human endeavours that seek to improve upon something birds have been successful at for millennia, namely breeding and nest-building. However, this is less a case of irony (that shown meaning the opposite of what is stated), and more a case of downright amusement and fun revealing the perverse reality of our modern world. There is much that has to be seen as tongue-in-cheek about the sources that Dougherty uses.
Whether the artist includes hand drawn anonymous images of posed friends, traces or adopts and enlarges found animal motifs, child drawings, Polka-esque balloons, giant screws from housing supplies or ironmongery manuals, what lies at the bottom of the work is her sense of humour, a parody if you like on the dishevelled world of modern thought. A world that owes as much to the flea market as to the encyclopaedia, as much to the detritus of the found and recycled as it does the rational world of directed meaning. That this is presented in a layered way on her sometimes painted surfaces (sometimes not), or found-bought and treated-untreated materials, points directly to a sought of visual levelling. In a deliberate manner Dougherty's work can be both fanciful and funny, as fanciful as a donkey and a stag (the priapic and the heroic, the libidinal and the beautiful) with eagles wings to take flight, or as bizarre as master-breeding of red canaries. While Dougherty delights in a crazy iconography and its sources, it remains an anti-iconography in other respects. Iconography generally supposes an ordering and symbolic explication of things in the world, Dougherty chooses to invert it by showing we live in a world where meaning slips away at the very moment you seek to grasp it.

©Mark Gisbourne

Hannah Dougherty

1980 born in Philadelphia, United States

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Education

Bachelor of Fine Arts, Minor in Literature. Maryland Institute College of
Art Baltimore, Maryland- USA

Grants

2004
Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin, Germany

2001
Temple University (semester abroad) Rome, Italy

2000
Priscilla Alexander Award Scholarship, Presidential Award, Department Merit Award

Solo Exhibitions

2006
The gardenhouse project No. 2, Berlinische Galerie/Landesmuseum für ..., Berlin
Hannah Dougherty, Klara Wallner Galerie, Berlin

2005
Hannah Dougherty, Galerie Krobath Wimmer, Wien, Austria
Hannah Dougherty, Kalara Wallner plus, Berlin
Hannah Dougherty, Arario Gallery, Korea

2004
Hannah Dougherty, Klara Wallner Galerie, Berlin, Germany
Hannah Dougherty, Junge Kunst, Wolfsburg, Germany

Group Exhibitions

2005
Prag Biennale, Nationalgalerie, Prag, Czech Republic

2004
Made in Berlin, curated by Zdenek Felix, Art Forum Berlin, Berlin
Art Forum Berlin/Klara Wallner Galerie
suberversiv, sexy und stilvoll - malerei heute, curated by Klara Wallner, Städtische Museen
Jena, Jena, Germany

2003
Art Forum Berlin, M.J. Wewerka Galerie/Curator Klara Wallner, Germany
subversiv, sexy und stilvoll- malerei heute, curated by Klara Wallner,
M.J.Wewerka Galerie, Berlin, Germany
Art Cubicle, Projektraum Matthias Kampl, Berlin, Germany
oursongislong, galerie kurt im hirsch, Berlin

2002
Internationale Künstler in Berlin, M.J.Wewerka Galerie, Berlin, Germany
G.U.T.s (Grand Unified Theories {in Art}), H.Lewis Gallery, Baltimore, MD., USA
Commencement, Decker Gallery, Baltimore, MD., USA
On Common Ground, Print Folio Collaboration (Technikon University, Johannesburg South
Africa and Maryland Institute College of Art)

2001
Juried Exhibition, Maryland Inst. College of Art, Baltimore, MD, USA
Poster Invitational, H. Lewis Gallery, Baltimore. MD, USA
Banks Gallery,Baltimore, MD, USA
Temple Gallery, Rome, Italy
Fine Arts Department, MD. Inst. Col. of Art, Baltimore, MD, USA

Collections

Arario Gallery, Soul, KoreaWilliam Kentridge, Johannesburg, South AfricaJohn Yau, New York, USAThe Fabric Workshop Gallery and Museum, Philphia, Pa., USACollection Herrmann, Berlin, GermanyCollection Dietz und Sarries, Berlin, GermanyCollection Rohrlapper, Berlin, GermanyCollection Gabriela u. Thomas Pitrowski-Rönitz, Celle, GermanyCollection Bleckmann, Berlin, GermanyCollection Thomas Lehnhart, Weimar, GermanyCollection Rohwer,München, GermanyPrivate Collections, BerlinPrivate Collection, Paris, FrancePrivate Collection, Hamburg, GermanyPrivate Collection, Philadelphia, Pa., USAPrivate Collection, Mannheim, GermanyPrivate Collection, Stuttgart, GermanyPrivate Collection, Zürich SwitzerlamdPrivate Collections London, England

Bibliography

2004
Herbstreuth, Peter, Hannah Dougherty, in: Kunstforum International, Bd. 173, 2004,S. 305 - 306 Kawai, Sumie, Hannah Dougherty, in: Monthly Art Magazine, Japan, 12/2004, S. 164Ingeborg Ruthe, Zentaur in Hundehütte, Berliner Zeitung, 30.09. 2004, S. 31Boris Hohmeyer, in: Werkstatt Berlin, art Das Kunstmagazin, Nr.9/September 2004Sebastian Preuss, in: Bilder sind wie gute Freunde, Berliner Zeitung, 18./19.09. (Magazin)Meike Jansen, Interview mit Hannah Dougherty, taz, 22.09.2004Andreas Tölke, in: Lebensabschittpartner, Madame, Nr. 5 2004, S. 66Hans-Albert Kraweik, Vogelhäuschen, Hirsch und Autos, Wolfsburger Allgemeine Zeitung,GermanyRaimar Stange, Painting Pop Post Problem Poetry -Gedanken zur Malerei von Hannah Dougherty, Katalog Hannah Dougherty, junge kunst, Wolfsburg, GermanyKlara Wallner, subersiv, sexy und stilvoll - malerei heute, Katalog zur Ausstellung, StädtischeMuseen Jena, Jena, Germany
2003
Richard Rabensaat, Zurück im Mikrokosmos, die tageszeitung, Berlin, GermanyRaimar Stange, Berlin:Wewerka Galerie, Kunst Bulletin, Zürich, SwizterlandRonald Berg, Der Berliner Kunstmarkt stürzt sich auf Malerei, Zitty, Berlin, GermanyChristiane Meixner, Gegen den Trend, Berliner Morgenpost, Berlin, Germany

(Selection)

Hannah Dougherty

Klara Wallner
Brunnenstraße 184
10119 Berlin
Germany

+49 30 3223670
+49 30 3257701
galerie@klarawallner.de
www.klarawallner.de