Six Paintings and One Photo from Saturday, June 25, 2005. Installed at bureau publik, (now dissolved) Copenhagen, DK. 15 March – 26 April, 2014.
For his exhibition at bureau publik, Doug Ashford presents a new series of works, which consider how modern notions of re-making the self and the body, puts all of us always already into a disaster. While working with this series of tempera paintings, Ashford repeated one composition, as if reforming one world six times. Imbedded in them is a photo of a flood survivor pausing in retreat from the oncoming waters.
Ashford was part of the New York-based collective Group Material and his own artistic practice is based on of the conviction prevalent in the group’s projects that the presentation of art is a political event. In recent years he has been working with an abstract language in the medium of painting in order to explore abstraction as an agent for social change. Abstraction can be seen as a withdrawal, retreat and rejection of the given rules, which can open up for new worlds to be imagined and this is where the transformative potential of abstraction is located. In this sense, abstraction contains a promise of reconfiguring the possible.
This promise is not only about change on a large scale. It also has to do with the experience of our own individual lives. As Ashford has put it in 2009: “After all the thinking and writing on how abstraction relates to social change, I have realized that one truth is that I began to make abstract paintings simply because I like the way they look. They look like the failures of my life re-illuminated.”
Curated by Katarina Stenbeck and Johanne Løgstrup
Ashford’s artists statement for press release_(link)
