Adam Dant Liberty 2008 ink on paper 95" x 72" [installation view, including the entire drawing, but cropped just inside the edges of the folio]
[detail, shot from an angle below]
Adam Dant was the artist London's Hales Gallery chose to show at Volta last month. Although the artist showed work drawn entirely from iconic sites of New York City, William Hogarth, his home town's genius hovered over these large ink drawings on paper.
Barry and I also saw a portfolio of a handsome print edition which was a version of this image, but run without including the Watteau Pierrot inside the construction scaffolding, in fact without including any figure. Dant had instead added a different character, in contrasting red ink, as a unique drawing on each print. Every one of them is a distinctly different monument substituting for the familiar "Liberty", something of an extended commentary on a subject dear to this engaged, lampooning artist.
Dant is perhaps still best known in England as the the creator of "Donald Parsnips' Daily Journal" [sample], a quirky broadsheet he wrote and drew, photocopied and handed out to fellow Londoners (and Parisians, Berliners, New Yorkers and Cairenes) every day for four years beginning in 1995.