Brian O’Doherty – Diverse Enigmas

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“It’s a running joke with my dear friend, the nonagenarian artist-slash-everything, Brian O’Doherty: I tease him for being a “dirty conceptualist”. This turn of phrase suggests a specific breed of aesthetic impurity. You see, by some accounts, the first generation of conceptual artists in New York were focused primarily on the idea of art made by thinking alone (hence their moniker). Yet, amongst that particular clique – whom O’Doherty exhibited with and even helped corral, most notably by editing and designing the milestone 1967 issue 5+6 of Aspen magazine on minimal and conceptual art – he stood out in multiple ways. For one, the polymathic O’Doherty’s work held the body and all its five senses dearly, in contrast to the coolly rational artistic currents of the 1960s. This insistence on the primacy of the embodied, holistic, and subjective aesthetic experience marks his works as different from other colleagues of that period, as well as signalling its continued relevance today.”
— Prem Krishnamurthy, Berlin, May 2021