LONDON.- Pangolin London announced the representation of British artist David Mach.
David Mach is one of the UK’s most recognised and respected artists working in contemporary art today. Known for his dynamic and imaginative large scale collages, sculpture and installations, Mach is heavily influenced by Pop Art and consumerism, and employs a sense of drama, performance and unpredictability in his work. His work explores materiality on a prodigious scale through the assemblage of mass–produced objects, most notably magazines, newspapers and car tyres to form large–scale installations. His work is representational, humorous, often controversial and uses scale to deliberately overwhelm audiences and demand their attention.
A former pupil of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee and the Royal College of Art, London, Mach established his reputation in the 1980s with a series of increasingly ambitious sculptures and installations including: Temple of Tyre in Edinburgh, the sumo wrestlers It Takes Two in Marseilles, the brick Train at Darlington, Big Heids off the M8 and the UK’s Portrait of a Nation – an epic collage, commissioned for the Millennium Dome. Mach is a former Turner Prize Nominee and was elected a Royal Academician in 1998.
The biggest exhibition of his career so far is Mach’s ‘Precious Light’ which took place in Edinburgh in 2011 to celebrate 400 years of the King James Bible. It took five years and 27 people to create a vast collection of sculptures and collages depicting scenes from the biblical text. The exhibition attracted worldwide media attention and has since been shown internationally.
Never content in making ‘easy’ art, the maverick Scot continuously challenges not only his physical ability but gravity and perception. He revels in the challenge of the physically demanding character of his work, siting that ‘hard graft never hurt anyone,’ and attributing his need to make physically demanding pieces as a response to growing up in the industrial region of Fife, Scotland. For Mach, the act of making is just as important as the finished article as he strives for a need to overcome the ‘Bohemian’ idea of the artist with their brush and chisel.
In keeping with the idea of consumerism and the everyday object, Mach’s recent work has seen him embark on a series of smaller scale collages comprised from cuttings of DC Thomson’s Commando comics, a medium he became acquainted with during his boyhood stating that; ‘Their stories and their drawing inspired me to construct mini epics charged with the energy of the original Thompson drawings.’ With prices starting from £300 these unique pieces are a great entry point for anyone looking to begin or continue collecting David Mach original works.
Not one to slow down, 2019 is set to be an exciting year for Mach with no less than 5 solo shows happening throughout the UK. In addition to this, Pangolin London will exhibit Mach’s work throughout their 2019 exhibition programme with a solo exhibition of Mach's work planned to take place in the Kings Cross gallery in Autumn 2020.
