Adam Dant

Adam Dant is a Jerwood Drawing Prize-winning British artist (2002).

Dant was born in Cambridge in 1967 but now lives and works in London. He has won praise from The Guardian[1] and Financial Times[2] for his Hogarthian graphic style. He was educated at the Liverpool School of Art (1987–1990Graphic Design BA), the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda Faculty of Fine Arts (1988) and the Royal College of Art (1989–1991, Fine Art Printmaking, MA).[3] Among the artists that have inspired him, Dant lists Albrecht Dürer, Pieter Bruegel, JMW Turner, George Cruikshank, Edward Burra and Saul Steinberg. Critics have most often liken Dant to Hogarth, whose 18th-century satirical prints were created with a moral purpose in mind. "Mine are underpinned by subversion," Dant says, "dressed up in traditional clothes." [4]

Career

In 1995, Dant created the Donald Parsnips Daily Journal, an art world pamphlet. It appeared daily for five years.

Dant subsequently made a reputation as the creator of "mockuments". These are works based on floor plans of the Louvre, the National Gallery and Tate Britain, in which flowcharts lead from image to image to create a psycho-history of the institution being anatomized.

Works

Dant’s investigations into “the interconnectedness of everything” and the arcane, earnest and often quite bizarre “belief systems” that append themselves to such a concept are the artists starting point for large “sepia ink-on-paper” drawings which create “psycho-histories”, “Monuments” and “Panoramas of colliding histories and fictions”. [5]

Exhibitions

Dant has work in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Musee d’Art Contemporain in Lyons, The New Art Gallery Walsall, the Deutsche Bank and UBS collections, and in many leading private collections including that of Charles, Prince of Wales. He has exhibited at Tate Modern, the Hayward Gallery, The New Art Gallery Walsall[6][7] and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The art writer Anthony Haden-Guest describes the new work as "witty and richly complex".[8]

References

  1. ↑ Skye Sherwin (12 September 2012). "Artist of the week 207: Adam Dant". The Guardian.
  2. ↑ Anthony Haden-Guest (9 November 2007). "Hedge fund heaven and hell". The Financial Times.
  3. ↑ "Adam Dant CV". Hales Gallery.
  4. ↑ Peppiat, Michael, Peterson, Jane A. Art Plural: Voices of Contemporary Art, Gatehouse http://artpluralgallery.com/catalogue/doc_artists/a85/AP-Book-Release.pdf
  5. ↑ Art Plural Gallery
  6. ↑ http://www.halesgallery.com/news/_75/
  7. ↑ http://thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk/whats-on/exhibition/adam-dantdant-on-drink-drawings-about-drinking-in-britain
  8. ↑ http://www.spearswms.com/good-life/private-view/816/the-triumph-of-debt.thtml