(click image for more details)Art Ads, 2008
enamel paint on a magazine page
39.5cm x 31cm, 41cm x 34cm, 39.5cm x 31cm
Corbusiers Cabin 2, 2008
66cm x 101cm
Lefthanded Brush Marks, 2008
59.5cm x 84cm
Jo McGonigal's practice could be viewed as a kind of 'quiet art iconoclasm'. She uses understated and often fragile or brittle media – such as pencil drawings on paper, neon, enamel paint on photographs or magazine pages – to question and reconfigure artists and their works from the Minimalist and Modernist canons. Focusing on establishment names – Donald Judd, Corbusier, Dan Flavin etc. – she unpicks their preoccupation with surface, line and order.
Philosophical, rather than destructive in its critique, McGonigal challenges the authority of the formal purity of the minimalist aesthetic. The hard-edged lines and clean surfaces of Minimalism are still visible beneath, but she super-imposes these with her own unashamedly handcrafted over-painting and drawing.
Whilst still possessing an undeniable cool beauty, her subtle interrogations could be seen as seeking to bring the whole modernist project down from its absolutist plane, recognise its shortcomings, and deliver it back to a level where other possibilities exist. Her series of manipulated gallery exhibition adverts, over-painted with her own name, are a more explicit critique of art world hierarchies and power systems, the artist's own relationship to them and her ability to affect – or not – the evolution of the culture she operates within.
Paul Stone, 2008
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find out more about Paul Stone
