MAUREEN DOUGHERTY – BORROWED TIME
2023-06-26At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Maureen Dougherty traveled to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where she joined a colleague to collaborate on a documentary film project. She had planned to be away from New York for about a month. The ensuing lockdown instead kept her in Pittsfield for more than two years. A longtime abstract painter, she found a small room that she could use as a studio and began to make meditative ink drawings at five o’clock each morning. These drawings would incrementally develop into figurative imagery, taking her art in a wholly new direction.
The artist has noted that “painting is like a clock, it has a sense of time.” It can move forward or, as in the works of Nicolas Poussin, it can stop and become eternal. She believes that our times call for a form of anti-fascist “degenerate” art — a perception that has intuitively led her to freely improvise on appropriated images from the OnlyFans porn hub. These paintings, focusing on lips, eyes, tongues, and teeth, on masked
faces and bodies glomming onto one another, underscore the lengths that a human being often needs to go, in an alienating and polarized society, simply to feel alive.
Opposite – BOXER, 2023
Exhibition runs through to September 16th, 2023
Cheim & Read
547 West 25 Street
10001 New York
USA
