Author Description

Irish artist Gerard Byrne (born 1969) works primarily in film and photography, which he presents as ambitious large-scale installations. His film and video projects reconstruct historically significant conversations derived from popular magazines from the 1960s-1980s; the effect of these works is to test the "cultural present" of the gallery space against the "defunct present" of a magazine article. Byrne's attraction to dialogue naturally inclines him towards an interest in theater, and he has worked on a number of projects with actors and sets--again in gallery spaces--that exploit distinctions between sculpture and set design, acting and non-acting, and spectacle and spectator. Byrne's work draws on a range of sources, from popular print media of the recent past to iconic modernist playwrights and thinkers such as Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre. This volume offers his first complete overview.