Peter Davies - Contemporary Artists

Fun With the Animals: Joseph Beuys Text Painting

Fun With the Animals: Joseph Beuys Text Painting The Saatchi Gallery
 

Peter Davies

Fun With the Animals: Joseph Beuys Text Painting

1998
acrylic on canvas

396.2 x 243.8

In a giant incomprehensible flow chart (a form borrowed from Beuys’s blackboard works), he maps out the ‘six degrees of separation’ of his art heroes, linking them impossibly to each other, and inevitably back to Beuys. It requires the complicated linear thinking of a late-night drinking game, but Davies proves it’s only twelve easy jumps from Picasso to Sarah Lucas (if Peter Doig and Matthew Barney’s love of sport can be counted as an actual link). Peter Davies presents an art history on a functional level: it’s about as close to science as it gets.
 
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