About

Bryan Gerard Duffy is a multi-disciplinary artist working in paint, sculpture, lens-based work, moving image and installation. He draws lines and also cross lines, both physically and metaphysically while investigating psychological and physical displacement. His work considers strategies of movement, restrictions, and exclusion of human beings while also exploring in-between spaces such as "occupied territories", buffer zones, “non-places”, surveillances, systems, the internet and our minds through mapping and mark making. 

His aim is to provoke anxiety; to initiate confrontations and divisions; to explore trauma; to observe secrecy whilst creating a desire to touch, with the curiosity to prod, poke and interact. To want the other. The fabrics, textures and tactile nature of his abstract forms exist to stimulate these human desires. The sculptural materials are acquired, found, collected, manipulated, repeated, interconnected, contorted and reconfigured in unrefined processes. 

Duffy believes games are a mode of cultural dialogue or exchange while simultaneously suggesting they are a precursor for war. Games are the formula for his art making process, a metaphor for his political concerns as well as a commentary on the competitive nature of humans. The need to survive, to evolve. 

The fragility of human existence comes to the fore, and is on a collision course with its own creation, artificial intelligence (A.I.). Technology influences his work as video, microscopic structures and photography are fundamental to his practice, as he uses glass plates throughout his practice. He frequently references his family’s photographic archival collection, Duffy’s Photography est. 1912. His work dissects measuring systems, mutations, DNA structures and algorithms as demonstrated by the geometric patternings of his paintings. He installs cctv cameras, incorporates social media platforms, as well as transcending borders using google maps to interpret the movement of people and their belief systems. His work methods are ever evolving, mutating and finding their own rules.

Duffy’s playful attitude to materials and situations counterbalances a very serious social conscience and political intent.

"His work has always hovered over the worlds of the political and the personal.  In these dense and beautiful tracking of a chess game between human and machine minds, he encourages us to think of Games, all kinds of games, War games, where territories are moved, peoples are shoved around like so many chess pieces; the overlapping of interests; the displacement of mind and body, of cultures, of belief systems.  But these structuralist kind of overlapping surfaces could be as much sophisticated abstractionism as they are the actual record of game moves.  And I love that complexity in his work; a totally committed social conscience and a totally committed personal vision." Alice Maher