| My drawings are usually made in graphite on paper. They are based on photographs that are either taken of places I am visiting or found, which are worked and reworked through successive rubbing out. The successive rubbing out creates a surface that gives the impression that the world is in a process of dissolving. The drawings meditate upon existential anxiety and a post-human epoch. In my recent drawings that were made in Chicago, entitled The End of History, towering Mies van der Rohe skyscrapers are depicted as if they were the remains of a lost civilization. These drawings merge a notion of the end of painting with the end of the world. |  |
Michael Mulvihill
My drawings are usually made in graphite on paper. They are based on photographs that are either taken of places I am visiting or found, which are worked and reworked through successive rubbing out. The successive rubbing out creates a surface that gives the impression that the world is in a process of dissolving. The drawings meditate upon existential anxiety and a post-human epoch.In my recent drawings that were made in Chicago, entitled The End of History, towering Mies van der Rohe skyscrapers are depicted as if they were the remains of a lost civilization. These drawings merge a notion of the end of painting with the end of the world. The drawings’ angular compositions and stark areas of tone are reminiscent of Modern Abstract paintings, but instead of an utopian world where the Modernist appeals for painting to end, and art dissolves into “the everyday,” the everyday world as we know, seems to have been lost forever.
When I was a child during the early 1980s, the threat of a total nuclear war was a tangible reality. The balance between existence and annihilation seemed very fine. The Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion focused this anxiety as it threw radioactive fallout across Europe. I am interested in how ideas, theories, and events impact personal lives. An ongoing series of drawings, also entitled The End of History, include portraits of individuals from, or associated with, the RAND Corporation. Intellectuals working for RAND applied rationalized economic models to a range of situations, from tactics to win a nuclear war, to creating incentives for workers in corporations.
The End of History (World Trade Center) (2010) is a graphite-on-paper work. This is based on a picture I took in New York in 1999 that was misplaced, so the drawing was produced with a picture download from the Internet that most resembled the original. My work depicts the organizations, politics, and institutions that have an impact upon personal life. This work draws together personal memories and the historically emblematic status of the World Trade Center, depicting the buildings’ monumental beauty and their continuing memory.
