Hi folks! It s me, Arty, back again with another exciting edition of Void Comix. And this issue is doubly exciting! First of all, the artist I m going to be telling you about is Damien Duffy, who works right here at Void, in Derry! How brilliant is that?!? Damien mostly uses painting in his work, and this exhibition features some new paintings, as well as a piece made with stained glass. And, of course, Damien s had his work exhibited all around the world - Glasgow, London, Naples, Berlin, New York and, best of all, Derry! Yaaay! The other exciting thing about this issue, is that I ll be announcing the winner of the Find Arty a Friend competition which Void ran in June this year. And look out for my new chum appearing in this issue s strip, too! For those of you who still don t know what happens here at Void, what it s all about and who started it, then let me enlighten you. The contemporary art gallery, Void, first opened way back in January 2005, in the old City Shirt Factory. It was started by a bunch of Derry s artists who called themselves Derry s Artists for Derry s Art, or DADA for short, and that also happens to be the name of an art movement from the early part of the 20th Century. Because of them and all their hard work you can see loads of fantastic contemporary art here, created by some of the best contemporary artists around today!
DAMIEN DUFFY This is your Art... Damien Duffy comes all the way from... Derry! How fantastic is that?!? He went off to Goldsmiths College in London to do a BA in Fine Art, but came back to do loads of art things right here at Void, which is where he has his studio. Damien s been at Void for ages, and he s curated loads of exhibitions, but best of all he s created Void s Art School, which provides tuition and studio space for students to get loads of arty learning! Brilliant! The work that Damien s exhibiting at Void is inspired by an abstract piece by a French artist, Marcel Duchamp, which is called The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. It s also known as The Large Glass, which is a bit less of a mouthful! And the reason it s also called that is because it s made with a large piece of glass! Now, the only problem with that is that after it had been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, way back in 1926, some butterfingers must have dropped it while it was being moved, and it cracked all over. Duchamp carefully repaired it, and it s now housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Damien s exhibition features a number of paintings and also a black stained glass window. The pieces all use those cracks in The Large Glass as inspiration, with the lines in the paintings and the leading in the glass both mimicking the cracks in the glass. Damien s title for his exhibition is The Brawl at Philly which is a reference to another piece of work that Duchamp made in glass, The Brawl at Austerlitz, and Philadelphia. And all this talk of brides and brawls and broken glass make it sound a bit like a punch-up at a wedding! Duchamp often used chance in the creation of his work. Damien s piece builds on that, but he s also made some other pieces using chance, where the flaws in a primed canvas will create features in the painting, much like the cracks in the glass. One of Duchamp s works that Damien didn t use as inspiration for this exhibition was called Fountain. But it wasn t a fountain at all. It was a toilet urinal that he put on the floor! Ewwwww!
Have you curdled your cranium with our brain-blasting puzzles? Well you can placate your pulsating parietal lobes by finding all the answers at: www.voidcomix.co.uk Next time we ve got a fantastic exhibition by Phil Collins, who s an English artist who trained in Northern Ireland. Phil works in video, and sometimes performance art as well. I ll be back here to tell you all about it, and being inspired to create my very own works of brilliant art! I m just about as excited as a Star-nosed Mole with a pneumatic drill! See you soon, Arty