Travel Pick: Art and Archaeology in United States
Because of Him

David McDermott (born 1952) and Peter McGough (born 1958)  met in the notorious East Village New York art scene of the 1980s, and, like the British duo Gilbert and George, have since been renowned for their seamless fusion of art and life.

In their 2006 exhibition with Cheim & Read, titled A True Story Based on Lies, McDermott & McGough explored 1950s American suburbia, using pop imagery from post-war advertisements and comic books to explore a subtext of homoeroticism and domestic tension in otherwise banal mid-century archetypes. In their current exhibition, Because of Him, McDermott & McGough continue their investigation of twentieth-century pop culture, this time focusing on female screen icons of the 1960s—Susan Hayward, Lana Turner and Claudia Cardinale among them.

The new exhibition includes several photo-realist paintings of carefully selected movie scenes in which a dramatically framed actress is central. The paintings are composed of two separate scenes from different movies, one black-and-white and one color, stacked horizontally so that one scene seems to bear weight upon the other and a new relationship or narrative is formed. The strong female protagonist of each frame conveys the scenes’ emotional impact, and the inevitable nostalgia of McDermott & McGough’s selected imagery lends a sense of cool introspection. The sensibility of the large scale, horizontally-composed paintings are echoed in a series of eight photo-realist paintings of 1960s era televisions, the distinctly boxy but individually unique exteriors framing single black-and-white scenes, the actresses’ expressive faces filling the screen. One powders her chin; another gazes with detached sensuality at a male, off screen, whose hand extends to light her cigarette. Painted with technical acuity, the works in the exhibition rely on their photo-realist rendering to convey conceptual and formal issues at play. The moving image, especially significant with the introduction of black and white T.V. and, subsequently, color movies, was a defining medium of the early 1960s. McDermott & McGough reproduce single frames of moving film on two-dimensional surfaces of painted canvas, thus freezing the image’s original identity and repositioning its impact.

The exhibition also hosts a complex installation of mirrors, positioned around the front room at different angles, and a sculpture, placed within the mirrored space, of a cardboard Campbell ’s soup box filled with romance-themed comic books but carved entirely from wood.