Brian O'Doherty

Brian O'Doherty, long-standing pseudonym Patrick Ireland, ( b. 1928 in County Roscommon, Ireland) is an Irish-American conceptual artist, author, illustrator and installation artist.

Alter ego

Brian O'Doherty worked for 36 years under a pseudonym. 1977 made ​​O'Doherty in Dublin with the performance NameChange public that his stage name " Patrick Ireland" would be from now on. From 1972 to 2008, he signed his works with the name Patrick Ireland. This was a response to Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland city of Derry, in which more than a dozen unarmed civilians were killed by the British Army. He explained that he would not exhibit in England, while the British troops not abzögen from Northern Ireland.

As the peace process in Ireland began, O'Doherty buried on 20 May 2008 in a symbolic act his alter ego Patrick Ireland ( death mask and coffin ) in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and officially adopted as artists his birth name Brian O'Doherty of. The film Lament for Patrick Ireland documented life and death of the artificial personality Patrick Ireland.

Life and work

O'Doherty comes from the Irish County Roscommon and is a Catholic denomination. He studied medicine at University College Dublin and at Cambridge University. After working for a year in a hospital for cancer patients, he emigrated in 1957 to the United States and continued his studies at Harvard University, where he graduated with a Master of Science ( M.Sc.) and at the same time exhibited before exclusively devoted to the visual arts.

About his time at Harvard University, he says:

" I first spent a year at Harvard when i came in 1957, doing all kinds of research. I got an MSc there, but I did not learn much. I switched from all things medical. I auditioned for a job as a television presenter at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from the Boston public television station, WGBH - TV. I would do a half hour each week from the galleries on the museum collections, so interviews with artists - Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Josef Albers, Walter Gropius, among others "

For NBC, he worked as an interviewer in the Invitation to Art program and met personalities like Muhammad Ali, Marcel Duchamp, Woody Allen and James Baldwin. In 1961 he went to New York to write for the New York Times.

In 1967 he married the art historian Barbara Novak with whom he lives in New York City and Todi.

With Morton Feldman, they met for a time almost every day in the Third Avenue for lunch. At this time were friends, among others, Dan Graham, Mel Bochner and Eva Hesse with the couple. Duchamp ( 1887-1968 ) was invited to a dinner by O'Doherty, with a portrait of Duchamp (1966 ) was born. This portrait was, among other things, a cardiogram, which chronicled his heartbeat.

The performance and installation Hello Sam is a memento mori for Samuel Beckett (1906 to 1989).

With his theory about the relationship between art and space of the white cube (1976 ) O'Doherty made ​​an important contribution to art history.

Exhibitions

Publications

• American Masters - The Voice and the Myth. About Hopper, Davis, Pollock, De Kooning, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Wyeth and Cornell. With photographs by Hans Namuth. 1975, ISBN 978-0-87663-680-0.
• The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P. - The strange case of Miss P. novella. 1992, ISBN 0-7011-4533-1.
• In the white cell / Inside the White Cube. Merve, 1996 ISBN 978-0-520-22040-9.
• The Cross -dresser 's Secret - The Secret of transvestites. Novella about the Chevalier d'Eon. ( 1728-1810 )
• The Deposition of Father McGreevy. Arcadia, 2000, ISBN 978-1-885983-39-8.
• Studio and gallery / studio and cube. Merve, 2012, ISBN 978-3-88396-276-4