b. 1959, Derry, Northern Ireland.
Since the 1980s, Willie Doherty has been a pioneering figure in contemporary art film and photography. At once highly seductive and visually disorientating, Doherty’s artworks tend to begin as responses to specific terrains (most often mysterious isolated settings; places, we suspect, with a troubled past) and evolve as complex reflections on how we look at such locations – or on what stories might be told about their hidden histories.
The primary point of geographical reference for Doherty during the three decades of his remarkable career has been his native city of Derry – a city famously defined and demarcated according to the traumatic divisions of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. From early conceptual photo-text works – focusing on the impossibility of establishing any ‘objective’ perspective on this territory of sectarian segregation and military surveillance – to diptych and serial works in film and photography that set contradictory points of view against each other, Doherty has returned again and again to Derry as source and subject, revisiting and re-viewing familiar places from alternative positions.
Willie Doherty has exhibited in many of the world’s leading museums, including the CAM Gulbenkian, Lisbon; Museum De Pont, Tilburg; IMMA, Dublin; SMK, Copenhagen; Fruitmarket, Edinburgh; TATE, London; Modern Art Oxford; Dallas Museum of Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Neue Galerie, Kassel; Kunsthalle Bern; Kunstverein München; Kunstverein Hamburg and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris. He was nominated twice for the Turner Prize and has participated in major international exhibitions including Documenta, Manifesta, the Carnegie International, and the Venice, São Paulo and Istanbul biennales.
Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include Where / Dove, Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, Modena, Italy (2020) travelling to Ulster Museum, Belfast, Northern Ireland (2021); ENDLESS, Kerlin Gallery, Online Viewing Room (2020); Shaping Ireland: Landscapes in Irish Art, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (2019); An American City, FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (2018); Truth: 24 frames per second, Dallas Museum of Art (2017); Remains, Art Sonje, Seoul (2017); Remains, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2016); Again and Again, CAM – Fundação Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2015) and UNSEEN, Museum De Pont, Tilburg (2014) and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012).