DUNCAN MACASKILL

Email : dfm@duncanmacaskill.com for more info
Biography
Born: Clydebank, Scotland
Graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1966.

Duncan MacAskill leads an extraordinary life as an artist. Activities seen at a glance throughout this biography expose recurring themes and influences that connect, between his Mail-art and paintings, which relate to sculptural installations and visa-versa. This exciting mail-art exhibition like the biography can pick up on the various methods MacAskill uses to solve and understand his painting language.
Collaboration is very important to MacAskill’s work. Through out his career he has considered working and sharing growing ideas with other performers and artists ias a vital and exciting resource

2006/2007 Ongoing residency at Toynbee Studios, Whitechapel, London under the commission of ARTSADMIN
Ongoing Projects: I have been sending mail art for over 15 years, possibly 1,000 cards a year. They are sent to most people I come into contact with in my work. Some people get more than others. They are not always cards. They are all unique.
1. Nomination; Usually the first cards people get. To be exhibited all together in the future.
2. Ground Works; All sizes of cards and paper taped to floors, walls, pavements, roads where they come into contact with human endeavour. No limit to time in situ. To be exhibited at a future date.

2005 The Kapelle, St Petri, an installation project in the dome of the chapel; a commission from Nora Schlecht in Brandenburg, Germany, in Autumn.
Part Two: A Tale of Three Cities Sofa Gallery, Druskininkai and possibly Kaunas, Lithuania and Scotland in 2006.
Continuing the Three Cities theme.
Invisible Dances ….From Afar: an artistic collaboration with Bock&Vincenzi, Funded by Arts Council and Artsadmin. A book and performance/Telephone-Dance. www.invisibledances.org.uk
Consignia Curated by Sas Mackie, Arts Council, England. At Hiscox Arts Project, in London. Group mail-art show, inspired by the work of Duncan MacAskill

2004 The History of the Postcard, lead artistic speaker at the Tate Modern series into exploring artists use of mail-art; curated by Sophie Howarth at the Tate Modern and the National Gallery, London
Messiaen Festival: Konzert Messiaen und Bohme, Gorlitz: Installation commission by Thorsten Teubl. A 2 part piece; first in Germany, then in the Polish prison camp. A collaboration of Music, live arts and sculpture.

2003 Part One: A Tale of Three Cities Urban Memories: Flocked landscape paintings and sculptures, Arts Space, Lithuanian Embassy, Berlin.
Urban Memories: A performance of specially commissioned music for A Tale of Three Cities, pieces by Judith Weir and the composer Andrew Poppy, performed by Daniela Bechly and pianist Raminta Lampsatis
Bodycraze commission from internationally renowned Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance company to create set and original dance floor for the national contemporary dance project at all the Selfridges branches in the UK.
SEVENTY-one per cent installation sculpture for the opening of the new Chichester Festival Theatre Season.
Stringgames installation design for collaboration with Martin Duncan’s play at the Chichester Festival Theatre’s fringe.

2002 each… and every inch at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow a multi-media promenade through 12 spaces of the new about the life and works of Elizabeth Smart the Canadian author. A collaboration with Cathie Boyd(Cryptic Theatre), composers Anthea Haddow, Glasgow, and Diane Labrosse, Montreal.
Duncan MacAskill’s installation in CCA2 was composed of 8 tonnes of Sitka Spruce sawn by the artist and made into a log wall of 30’ x 15’, 600 wooden books, small flocked paintings and a Perspex poetry sculpture.
Size Matters group show at Stephen Lacey Gallery in London.
Sculpture, installation and paintings.

2001 Affine Redundancy: solo show at the Ferguson McDonald Gallery in London; three months performance of presenting installations in the window of the gallery, some lasted a day, some longer. All were videoed and shown during the exhibition. (A piece of Welsh field was transported to the gallery to grow in a site-specific box in the window space throughout the exhibition.) paintings, sculptures, ash painting, projections and sound installation.

2000 Off The Wall 10 metre steel commissioned construction mounted on the wall in the art space at Sadler’s Wells.
Off The Wall/Live Performance: in 3 parts; 1. Laurie Booth performed at the Private View, music Hans Peter Kuhn. 2. Ragnild Olsen and Anna Williams, music by Glyn Perrin and Matteo Fargion. 3. Wayne McGregor. Performance/dance workshop at Chisenhale Gallery. Lucy Burge (Rambert) and Ann Dickie developed this piece with wall mirrors and video.

1999 Recent Work Exhibition at Peg’s Club, London paintings and sculptures exclusive site specific mail art exhibition.
Exhibition at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Other Place; paintings, sculptures and blackboards during and inspired by their production of Antony and Cleopatra.
Pastoral a sound environment - made with the collaboration of composer Glyn Perrin, also shown at The Other place.
Bankside Browser a Tate Modern project at St Christopher House, London. Group Show – work was submitted to a giant archive which can be accessed by public, in gallery and virtually, online - An interactive exhibit where viewer could touch sculptures sent by artist with little museum gloves.
An original sound piece was made to listen to while perusing the objects.
Pure Paint a group exhibition at Stephen Lacey Gallery in London Drawings
Time and the Room – theatre design and installations for Botho Strauss’s play at the Nottingham Playhouse and the Edinburgh Festival, collaboration with director Martin Duncan.

1998 The Daily Post – a solo mail art exhibition, The Milton Gallery, St Paul’s School, London. Interactive viewer investigations invited. Various performance pieces were held through duration of exhibition: FOUR PARTS THREE PIECES – a car park GROUND WORK, a swimming pool TREE PIECE and river WATER COLOUR all done with the students.
Gallery Talk about his continuing journey of the mail art and the relation to his work as a painter.
Post In Case A mail art exhibition at McGowin Library Pembroke College, Oxford. MacAskill sent all the exhibits through the mail
Water Colours Three performance art pieces made at Vauxhall, Tower Bridge and Bankside. Large 6’ x 4’ water colour sheets where floated down the Thames individually and in groups. A precursor to 3 cities.
Ground Works Installation at the Tate Britain. Water-colour-paper-performance – measuring via the prints made at end of day, the activity and life at the Tate during one day
Postures A solo mail art exhibition at Peter De Witt’s Jazz Café in London during the Greenwich Festival. POSTURES – a performance with 6 players, devised by Duncan MacAskill, took place during the exhibition.
Postage A solo art exhibition at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts de Quimper, France. Including the showing of WHAT IF paintings and a FLOOR PIECE. During Residency and lectures
What If selected gallery artists at Stephen Lacey Gallery in London. Recent Paintings.

1997 NETWORKING: Art by Post, Fax and Phone – an Arts Council/South Bank Centre National Touring Exhibition - other exhibitors included Ray Johnson, the American mail artist and David Hockney. Curated by Andrew Patrizio.
Residency: at Wapping Project London.
ACOUSTIC SHADOWS – a major one man retrospective at Wapping Project, in London. An amazing show at the hydraulic pumping station. Installation, Large Paintings, Performance, Mail Art Interactive Project LAST POST- A thousand-cards. Light Installation called Wapping Wall - a sound environment and canvassed floor sculpture inspired by a verse of Omar Kayyam. The sound environment was a collaboration with composer Glyn Perrin (CD available).
Performances Exclusive to Acoustic Shadows:
FLOOR CARDS with dancer/choreographer Kitty Malone.
ACOUSTIC SHADOWS with soprano Daniela Bechly who promenaded all the rooms at Wapping and bursting into song whenever she felt like it.
A Video commission of the MACASKILL IN WAPPING/ACOUSTIC SHADOWS was made by the Wapping Project.
Recent Work Exhibition of paintings, sculptures and works on paper for the opening of fashion designer Ally Capellino’s new shop in London. Kitty Malone performed FLOOR CARDS during the opening.
Dangerous Talk commissioned by Ian Spink (Second Stride) at The Place in London. A festival collaboration between - dancers, choreographers, musicians, performers and artist. DANGEROUS TALK was later presented at the opening of the Opera Music Theatre Forum Conference in Cambridge.
A COW. A MOOON. A FULL STOP – commissioned by the NOW Festival, Nottingham. A four-day multi-media performance piece at Sneinton Market Square - collaboration between Martin Duncan and Duncan MacAskill and their 20 performers.
Recent Work – Commissioned exhibition of paintings and drawings at Nicole Farhi’s Bond Street boutique in London.
The Three Magi A 20’ abstract tree steel sculpture installation for the Economist Building Plaza, St James’s, London.

1996 DUNCAN MACASKILL Recent Works solo exhibition at the Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham. Exhibition included paintings, works on paper, HOLD TWO a climbing painting that people could climb up during the exhibition. A performance took place of HOLD TWO with Aletta Collins, Andrew Robinson and Duncan MacAskill during the exhibition.
La Mostra Continua at the Djanogly a collaboration with Martin Duncan an hour long performance of ironing, coffee, useful leaflets and toe dance and had a cast of 22 performers.
Duncan MacAskill gave a gallery talk .

1995 Lead By The Nose solo exhibition at Nottingham Playhouse during Martin Duncan’s production of THE NOSE based on the story by Nikolai Gogol. Sculpture/performance photographs and documentaria.
Tango Variations a commission and artistic collaboration for the choreographer Laurie Booth & co. at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London and national and international tour. Design included sculpture, live projections and monitors and large scale installation. Live music composed by Juan Cedron and Hans Peter Kuhn.
Cabinet Paintings group painting show at Theo Waddington Fine Art, Cork Street, London.
Drawings Of Distinction at Theo Waddington Fine Art, Cork Street, London. Two pieces in a gallery show which included Lucian Freud, Jean Dubuffet, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

1994 DUNCAN MACASKILL Recent Paintings, solo show at Reeds Wharf Gallery, Tower Bridge. Paintings and Drawings. Icarus An installation with choreography, a collaboration with Laurie Booth. La Mostra Continua first national performance.
Wonderlawn Artist/designer collaboration with choreographer Laurie Booth and composer Gavin Bryars . Including the extraordinary huge microphoned metal fence and mobile Astroturf platforms. Opening at the Brighton Festival, performed at the Royal Court, Barclay New Stages and a national tour.
101 Chairs commissioned by Sebastian Bergne at Artangel to customise a Conran chair. Photographic Exhibition.
Residency at La Mama’s Great Jones Street studios designing and painting.
Is That All There Is? A contemporary dance piece choreographed by Amir Hosseinpour at La Mama, New York. And originally performed at the Almeida Theatre in London (1993)

1993 Maya Deren; a performance - Three day performance collaboration with Laurie Booth at the Zap Club in Brighton, England about the poet/choreographer.
Installation Window - Designed a metal Christmas tree for commission by Nicole Farhi in her Floral Street boutique in London. Exhibition of recent paintings and drawings throughout the shop.

1991 Small Moments In Time - Collaboration with director Martin Duncan and composer Judith Weir at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

1990 Post Cards – Mail Art exhibition at Chelsea Arts Club 250 Cards sent between 1987 – 1990. Collected from receivers for exhibition.
Dancehouse A films for BBC 2. Resident Art Director, produced by Emma Burge and Peter Mumford. Collaborated with Tim Albery, Frank McConnell, John Lunn and Christine Devaney at AFTER IMAGE studio in Brixton, London and with Laurie Booth and Russell Maliphant at the CIRCUS SPACE. Video Installation and Paintings.

Last Press Release: Sofa Gallery Lithuania

A Tale of Three Cities: Part two
An Exhibition By Duncan MacAskill

Duncan MacAskill was born in Clydebank and studied drawing and painting at Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, and now lives and works in London. MacAskill is a painter who has also worked with other artistic disciplines; like sculpture, performance, sound and dance. MacAskill has made dance environments and collaborated with the choreographers Laurie Booth, Russell Maliphant and Wayne McGregor. He has also designed theatre and performance pieces. These works interact with his paintings.

For twenty years he has been creating his own unique mail art. Over that period he has posted over 10,000 pieces. Each piece represents a daily sketch book; every card carrying an idea and a thought, a completely original one off.

For this exhibition at the Sofa, he has mainly used card from the debris of daily life, everything is used. Even the leftovers are stuck together to be sent: an artistic recycling. This process is a metaphor for how artists use their experience in life to inspire their work. All elements of life, feelings and desires, are recycled into paintings. He wants to show how his mail-art, his daily working sketches, his doodles, his ideas, may seem unrelated to his larger works, but that in fact his mail-art is an unconscious process of problem solving: an exorcism. Even his mail-art techniques can seem completely at odds with their subject allowing; different meanings and connections to be assigned to them.

Duncan MacAskill’s A Tale of Three Cities is a three part International exhibition. Part One happened last year at the Art Space in the Lithuanian Embassy in Berlin. Part Two is here in Lithuanian. The concluding part will take place in Scotland. Each of the Exhibitions are original but are tied together by themes in MacAskill’s method of recording the artist process; using paintings, mail art and sculpture installations.

MacAskill feels his mail art, although schizoid, has the ability to allow the artist to release and liberate the ideas as and where they happen, and then in time worked through into his painting. Unfortunately as he sends most of his work to other people he has few examples of his own. It’s only recently he has thought not seeing the work together might be slowing up the creative process. This exhibition at Sofa is very important to see the work together as a collective and put together the relationships and connections, analysing how and what the mail-art is saying about MacAskill’s direction in painting. With this exhibition, MacAskill wants to explore whether his mail-art can reveal the artistic process and relate them back to his paintings?

Macaskill is thrilled that the British and Lithuanian Postal Services have worked so hard to make this Exhibition possible. His mail-art, has fuelled numerous exhibitions, performances and installations; although made from recycled life, mail-art piece can hold the energy, when released can take a sketch on a postcard to a painting on a gallery wall.

Quotes on MacAskill's Work & Life

Quotes on MacAskill and his work (paintings and mail-art):

“This is a ritual. The card must be posted, but not in an envelope. The journey of the postcard is part of its significance and it may well get altered by franking machines and post-bag buffering –
One favourite card I received came after we’d visited the Tate together and talked about a painting by Baselitz with its characteristically inverted image; we’d also been discussing Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit figure, the shape which can be seen as a duck or as a rabbit, but not both at once. The next day ‘Canard’ arrived; a painting of an inverted duck-rabbit”

Nigel Warbuton
Philosopher and Writer
Author of the internationally acclaimed “the Art Question”
Published by Routledge.

“… MacAskill’s unerring eye has orchestrated this diverse matter into the most satisfying of arrangements: you are confronted with a beautifully composed installation of abstract and symbolic forms, packed with colour accents and tonal variations. The exhibition betrays a wealth of invention – here equally are comment, concept, formal values and interpretation. Perhaps ultimately a quest for identity”

Andrew Lambirth
Art Critic and Writer

“To receive a postcard from Duncan MacAskill is to participate in one of the most original works in contemporary art. – On closer acquaintance their place within MacAskill’s work becomes clear. They are, in a sense, his sketchbooks, yet they also have a conceptual presence in the fact that they have been handled, sorted and delivered by other agents than the artist himself”

Iain Gale
Art Critic of the Independent
March 1996

“MacAskill is both an artist who appreciatively wonders at the world, and also a curious one, true to his age, for whom inquisitiveness and lack of dogma have led him to pursue the practise of art in many ways but always keeping open the possibility for the instinctive urge to overtake him.”

Andrew Patrizio
Curator Hayward Gallery London

“Duncan MacAskill’s working method skewers attempts at definition. There are paintings, sculptures, architectural interventions (the residue of performances) and soundworks, some using the space, others grafted on. – this is more like a cinematic journey than a typical gallery going experience. – there is something very European, very elemental about it.”

Martin Herbert
Art Critic Time Out

Links

Search AOL.co.uk

page created with 1-2-3 Publish