McDermott & McGough

David McDermott

Born in 1952 in Hollywood (USA), he lives and works in New York and Dublin.

Peter McGough

Born in 1958 in Syracuse (USA), he lives and works in New York and Dublin.

A life in the past (recomposed)

David McDermott studied at Syracuse University, New York, as did Peter McGough, who then went on to take a diploma at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. They met in New York in the early 1980s. Alongside Julian Schnabel, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, they were active figures on the New York art scene of the day.

McDermott & McGough’s paintings, photos, sculptures and videos illustrate a total refusal to live within our linear time frame, in which past, present and future are distinct. As they see it, all periods coexist simultaneously. And in their way of life they bring the past into the present by both living in an interior created in keeping with the style of a given historical period, from the clothes (tail coats and gaiters) to the utensils. They antedate their works in keeping with the scene represented, and choose the media and supports for their pieces by the same logic: oil paint on linen canvas, a camera from the turn of the twentieth century, salt-solution prints, palladium, etc.

At the Espace EDF Bazacle, McDermott and McGough are presenting a selection of works, including some of the ten Conspiracy Paintings (1997), which bear the fictive date of 1928. These oils on canvas imitate satirical prints of the period, a vehicle which the artists use to offer a serious but ludige vision of racism, homophobia and the Catholic religion. There are also photographs in the Victorian style and a black-and-white film in the style of the 1950s that looks like an authentic product of the times. In the 2000s McDermott and McGough had a real passion for this period and made several series of paintings reproducing imagery from Hollywood films and comics of the 1930s and 60s. Most of them are composed like comic strip sequences juxtaposing scenes that feature famous actresses such as Jennifer Jones, Rita Hayworth and Lauren Bacall. These women often look sad, overwrought or tearful. The title of the works, That Would Surely Break My Heart, Something I’ve Never Had, What a Fool I am...1967, seems to hint at the real suffering and frustration lurking behind these stereotyped melodramatic images.

A quick assessment of McDermott and McGough might see them as simulationists in the same vein as Mike Bidlo, Sherrie Levine or Elaine Sturtevant, all of whom deliberately copied the work of other artists in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, in order to question notions of reproduction, copyright and the moral ownership of the artwork. But McDermott et McGough are not in that game. For them, art is like a time machine, a way of defying the chronology of aesthetics.

In 1995, delving into their encyclopaedic knowledge of art history, they revived the forgotten technique of portraits done by candlelight in their Silhouette Portraits. Their work can be found in numerous public collections, especially in the United States (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Tampa Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis). Since 1984 they have exhibited regularly at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, at Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris, and at Sperone Westwater in New York.