About
We are delighted to welcome two world famous artists - David McDermott and Robert Hawkins - to introduce Basquiat to the Festival audience on Sunday Feb 11th. Both lived in New York during Basqiuats time in the city and were very much part of the inner circle of radical artists living in the Big Apple in the late 90's/early 80's. David McDermott plays himself in the movie. Hawkins closed his 1990's art decade as part of 'The Bowie Show' in The Rupert Goldsworthy Fine Art Gallery. Both have many stories to recount about Bowie, Warhol and the NYC art scene.
David McDermott is one half of the McDermott & McGough, contemporary artists known for their work in painting, photography, sculpture and film. They currently split their time between Dublin and New York City. McDermott & McGough are best known for using alternative historical processes in their photography, including the techniques of cyanotype, gum bichromate, salt, tri color carbo, platinum and palladium. Among the subjects they approach are popular art and culture, religion, medicine, advertising, time, fashion and sexual behavior. Their photography involves appropriating images and objects from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century, and they project an image of themselves as gentlemen, posing as erudite, impertinent characters. In this way they have chosen to immerse themselves in the period of the Victorian era at the close of the 19th century to the style of the 1930s. During the 1980s, McDermott & McGough dressed, lived, and worked as artists and “men about town,” circa 1900-1928: they wore top hats and detachable collars, and converted a townhouse on Avenue C in New York City’s East Village, which was lit only by candlelight, to its authentic mid-19th century ideal. “We were experimenting in time,” says McDermott, “trying to build an environment and a fantasy we could live and work in.”
Like their lifestyle, their photographs and paintings betoken a flat refusal to embrace the historical present. This obsession with the past is reflected in the subjects and styles they bring back to life, and in the precise fictional dates they give to their works. The personal dimension of their work makes it into a deliberately provocative and controversial contemporary artistic performance dealing with political and sociological issues.
Robert Hawkins was born in California and was a staple of the underground NYC art scene in the 1980's. It's well known that Basquiat only liked buying one artist's work - Robert Hawkins. Hawkins curated 'The Bowie Show' in the Rupert Goldsworthy Fine Art Gallery in New York in the late 1990's and has met Bowie many times over the years.