Patrick Doherty

Patrick Doherty is a new breed of artist, working across street and fine art contexts in a way that blithely skips around the current mainstream of more conceptually based practices.

Okay, maybe this isn’t so new and who can say that the mainstream is totally conceptually based, but Doherty is clearly a part an international renaissance of street/fine art jamming that includes artists as diverse as Clare E. Rojas, Barry McGee, Thomas Campbell and Andrew Pommier.

Doherty has always been an artist. “At primary school, at high school, it was the only thing I was ever good at”, he says. This early passion saw him get knee-deep in Perth’s graffiti culture. “ For me the graffiti scene”, he says, “was a social thing, a way of hanging out with friends. It wasn’t an end in itself for me. I always wanted a degree in art and to be “an artist”. So Doherty did just that, graduating with a Highly Commended award from Curtin University last year.

Since then, he’s been busy. He’s had a solo show at Keith & Lottie, painted two toilet blocks in the Breadbox Gallery as part of the Absolution Project and has also started a curatorial career, putting together the Duty Free exhibition at Arthouse in January. This show had Doherty cover the gallery’s walls with brown paper to be covered by thirty young artists. ]He is also curating some exhibitions for this October’s Artrage festival. I guess both of these curatorial enterprises essentially see him extending the social side of graffiti that he enjoys into new, art contexts. As the 25 year old puts it, “I have two groups of friends really, the art school friends and those who were doing the street art. Amongst my age group, street art is what we know as ‘Art’”. From street art, he has understood the benefits of cultivating an accessible style and graphic immediacy.

Accordingly, his art world influences are not the latest batch of heavyweights – the Barneys and Stan Douglases – but the old school expressionist guard and their offshoots. For instance, he’s interested in German expressionism as well as, say, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. Doherty’s work is, in his own terms, “urgent and direct”. Let’s think of it as an unholy mating between, say, Otto Dix and Robert Ryman. As such, it deals with the animalist sides of human nature, often drawing on a fantasy feel, that is quickly laid out and then slowly honed, but is always critically aware of the ground and material that these visions are called forth upon. In a kind of materialism without the manners bender, Doherty’s work is refreshingly honest and down-to-earth.    

Robert Cook – 2005

Associate Curator of Contemporary Art,

Art Gallery of Western Australia)