Willie Doherty, Without Trace, De Pont Museum
2 March – 5 September 2021
De Pont Museum, Tilburg, The Netherlands
Willie Doherty in group show Without Trace at De Pont Museum, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Willie Doherty
Willie Doherty, Ghost Walk III, 2016, pigment print mounted on aluminium framed, edition of 3, 106.6 x 159.8 cm image size
Willie Doherty, Ghost Walk II, 2016, pigment print mounted on aluminium framed, edition of 3, 106.6 x 159.8 cm image size
Willie Doherty, Where / Dove, 2020, (video still) two screen installation, colour, stereo sound, duration 15 minutes
Willie Doherty, ENDLESS, 2020, Single Screen Video Installation, 4K Video, Black and White, Stereo Sound, 13 minutes
Willie Doherty, ENDLESS I, 2020, diptych: pigment print on Hahnemūhle Photo Rag 308gsm, 100% Cotton, white, acid free, framed, edition of 3, 50 x 66.6 cm / 19.7 x 26.2 in each unframed, 52 x 68.6 x 3 cm / 20.5 x 27 x 1.2 in each framed
Willie Doherty, LABYRINTH OF LIES, 2020, Inkjet print on reverse of 160gsm acid free paper, edition of 6, 21 x 29.7 cm unframed / 8.3 x 11.7 in unframed
Willie Doherty
Between
(Where the Roads Between Derry and Donegal Cross The Border)
2019
diptych: framed pigment prints
62 x 160 cm / 24.4 x 63 in each unframed
64 x 162 cm / 25.2 x 63.8 in each framed
Willie Doherty
Ashen, Restless 2018
quadriptych, framed pigment print mounted on Dibond, edition of 3
66.7 x 100 cm / 26.3 x 39.4 in each unframed
68 x 101.1 x 3.5 cm / 26.8 x 39.8 x 1.4 in each framed
Willie Doherty
Aynadamar, The Fountain of Tears, (I) / Aynadamar, La Fuente de las Lágrimas (1) 2018
framed pigment print mounted on Dibond, edition of 3
106.6 x 159.8 cm / 42 x 62.9 in unframed size
Willie Doherty
Aynadamar, The Fountain of Tears, (II) / Aynadamar, La Fuente de las Lágrimas (II) 2018
framed pigment print mounted on Dibond, edition of 3
106.6 x 159.8 cm / 42 x 62.9 in unframed size
Willie Doherty,
Dreams of Security, Dreams of Infiltration, 2018,
diptych, framed pigment print mounted on Dibond,
106.6 x 159.8 cm each / 42 x 62.9 in each unframed
107.5 x 160.5 cm each / 42.3 x 63.2 in each framed
Willie Doherty, Dreams of Longing, Dreams of Regret, 2017, five framed pigment prints mounted on Dibond, edition of 3, 66.7 x 100 cm image size / 68.2 x 102.2 cm framed size
Willie Doherty
Dreams of Renewal, Dreams of Annihilation 2017
triptych, framed pigment prints mounted on dibond
edition of 3
121.6 x 419.6 cm / 47.87 x 165.19 in
Willie Doherty, Loose Ends, 2016, 2 channel HD video, 18 minutes
Willie Doherty, Loose Ends V, 2016, diptych, pigment prints mounted on Dibond, framed, 107.6 x 161 cm / 42.4 x 63.4 in image size
Willie Doherty, Loose Ends VI, 2016, diptych, pigment prints mounted on Dibond, framed, 107.6 x 161 cm / 42.4 x 63.4 in image size
Willie Doherty, Loose Ends II, 2016, diptych, pigment prints mounted on dibond, framed, 107.6 x 161 cm / 42.4 x 63.4 in image size, 111 x 164.5 x 5 cm / 43.7 x 64.8 x 2 in framed size
Willie Doherty, Loose Ends I, 2016, diptych, pigment prints mounted on dibond, framed, 107.6 x 161 cm / 42.4 x 63.4 in image size, 111 x 164.5 x 5 cm / 43.7 x 64.8 x 2 in framed size
Willie Doherty
Facility 2016
2 works each pigment print mounted on aluminium framed
106.6 x 159.8 cm / 42 x 62.9 in
71.2 x 106.6 cm / 28 x 42 in
Willie Doherty
Damage II
2014
C-Type colour photograph
70 x 46.5cm / 27.6 x 18.3 in
Willie Doherty
Damage III
2014
C-Type colour photograph
70 x 46.5cm / 27.6 x 18.3 in
Willie Doherty
Remains (Along the Wall)
2013
c-print mounted on aluminium (edition of 3)
120 x 160 cm / 47.2 x 63 in
Willie Doherty
REMAINS
2013
HD video
15 mins
Remains (Kneecapping behind Creggan Shops)
2013
c-print mounted on aluminium
120 x 160 cm / 47.2 x 63 in
Secretion
2012
video installation, HD video projector, Blu-Ray player, stereo amplifier, two speakers, colour and sound
Duration 20 minutes
First shown at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, June 2012
collection of Sammlung Goetz, Munich and Neue Galerie, Kassel
TO THE BORDER
A Fork In The Road
The place where Ciaran Doherty was executed in February 2010, accused of being a British informer, he was abducted two hours before his body was dumped at the side of the road.
1986 - 2012
black and white fibre photograph mounted on aluminum
122 x 183 cm / 48 x 72 in
Ancient Ground
2011
video installation, HD video projector, Blu-Ray player, stereo amplifier, two speakers, High definition video, colour, sound
Duration: 8 mins
First shown at Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, September 2011
collection of Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
Segura
2010
Video Installation, HD video projector, one Blu-Ray player, one stereo
amplifier, two speakers
Duration 10 min
First shown at Manifesta 8, Murcia
Ghost Story
2007
video installation, DVD, colour, sound
Duration 15 mins
Show of Strength lll
2006
plexiglas and laminated c print on aluminum
121.9 x 152.4 cm / 48 x 60 in
NON-SPECIFIC THREAT I (Unspeakable Terror)
2003
c-print mounted on plexiglas
156 x 183 cm / 61.4 x 72 in
Re-run
2002
Video, 2 projections, colour
30 min
Collection of the Tate
Border Incident
1994
cibachrome on aluminium
125 x 186.9 cm / 49.2 x 73.6 in
the only good one
1993
Installation of two LCD video projectors, two video players, four powered speakers, two videotapes (color, sound), projected simultaneously onto walls at right angles to each other
Duration 10 mins, looped
The Bridge
1992
2 photographs, black and white, on paper mounted onto aluminium panel
122 x 183 mm
Collection of the Tate
Protecting / Invading
1987
black & white photographs with text, diptych
122 x 183 cm / 48 x 72 in
Undercover / Unseen
1985
black & white photographs mounted on aluminium framed, diptych (3/3)
122 x 183 cm / 48 x 72 in each
Fog: Ice / Last Hours of Daylight
1985
black & white photographs mounted on aluminium with text, diptych
122 x 183 cm / 48 x 72 in
Willie Doherty, Opened Ground,
Void, Derry, Northern Ireland
9 February - 30 March 2019
Willie Doherty,
Borderlines, curated by Tessa Giblin, Talbot Rice Gallery,
23 February - 4 May 2019
so it is
Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh
April 7 - August 7, 2017
Courtesy of the Mattress Factory
Willie Doherty
Home
Villa Merkel
14 February - 24 April 2016
Willie Doherty
REMAINS
17 January - 15 March 2014
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Willie Doherty
REMAINS
17 January - 15 March 2014
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Willie Doherty
REMAINS
17 January - 15 March 2014
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Willie Doherty
REMAINS
17 January - 15 March 2014
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Willie Doherty
REMAINS
17 January - 15 March 2014
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Willie Doherty
REMAINS
17 January - 15 March 2014
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Willie Doherty
Secretion
21 May – 1 September 2013
IMMA @ NCH at Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin
Willie Doherty
Secretion
21 May – 1 September 2013
IMMA @ NCH at Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin
Willie Doherty
Secretion
21 May – 1 September 2013
IMMA @ NCH at Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin
Willie Doherty
Documenta 13
09 June - 16 September 2012
Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Ingvild Goetz, Munich
Willie Doherty
DISTURBANCE
21 April - 24 June 2012
Towner in association with Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.
Willie Doherty
DISTURBANCE
05 September 2011 - 15 January 2012
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
Willie Doherty
Buried
25 April 12 July 2009
The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
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).
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FIAC Online Viewing Rooms
2nd - 7th March 2021
Willie Doherty
ENDLESS - Online Viewing Room
27 May - 15 June 2020
Shadowplay
12 July- 28 August 2019
Willie Doherty
Loose Ends
3rd September - 19th October 2016
Willie Doherty
REMAINS
17th January - 15th March 2014
Willie Doherty
LAPSE
31st May - 7th July 2012
GROUP SHOW SUMMER 2010
Gallery Artists
23 July - 04 September 2010
FIFTY PERCENT SOLITUDE
Willie Doherty, Maureen Gallace, Liam Gillick, Siobhan Hapaska, Stephen McKenna, Isabel Nolan, Sean Scully, Hiroshi Sugimoto & Paul Winstanley
27th November 2008 - 11th February 2009
Celebrating 20 Years
An exhibition of new work by Kerlin Gallery Artists
28th April - 24th May 2008
SUMMER GROUP SHOW 2007
20 July - 05 September 2007
Willie Doherty
Empty
11 October - 10 November 2006
SUMMER GROUP SHOW 2006
18 August - 30 September 2006
WINTER GROUP SHOW 2006
Gallery Artists
19 December - 07 January 2006
SUMMER GROUP SHOW 2005
Gallery Artists
12th August - 3rd September 2005
Willie Doherty
UNKNOWN MALE SUBJECT
18 October - 16 November 2002
Summer Exhibition
06 July - 04 August 2001
Gallery Artists
9 June - 8 July 2000
Willie Doherty - Home
Willie Doherty
2016
Willie Doherty - Again and Again
Willie Doherty
Willie Doherty - UNSEEN
Willie Doherty
2013
Willie Doherty - Anthology of Time Based Work
Willie Doherty
2007
Willie Doherty, WHERE / DOVE
9 February - 16 May 2021
Fondazione Modena Arti Visive - Palazzina dei Giardini
Fondazione Modena Arti Visive presents Where / Dove, the first solo exhibition by Willie Doherty in an Italian institution, which will be held in the Palazzina dei Giardini exhibition venue. The exhibition is curated by Daniele De Luigi and Anne Stewart.
Willie Doherty, BBC News 'Art in 2021'
27 December 2020
Ulster Museum, Belfast
Willie Doherty's upcoming exhibition 'Where/Dove' at the Ulster Museum, Belfast included in BBC News 'Art in 2021: The highlights to hope for'.
Willie Doherty, Walking Through Walls
Berliner Festspiele, Gropius, BAU, Berlin
12 September 2019 - 19 January 2020
Walking Through Walls marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and interrogates the experience of vulnerability and anxiety caused by power structures that thrive on confinement and segregation.
21st Century Ireland in 21 Artworks
Dorothy Cross & Willie Doherty
Glebe House and Gallery, Donegal, Ireland
14 July - 14 September 2019
Shaping Ireland: Landscapes in Irish Art
Gerard Byrne, Dorothy Cross, Willie Doherty, Kathy Prendergast, Sean Scully & Samuel Lawrence Cunnane
13 April - 7 July 2019
National Gallery of Ireland
Spanning 250 years, Ireland: Landscapes in Irish Art comprises artworks by fifty artists, exploring the relationship between people and the natural world.
Willie Doherty, Opened Ground
Void, Derry, Northern Ireland
9 February - 30 March 2019
Willie Doherty's series of photographs of the border document empty roads reaching into the landscapes laden with overtones of what came before. The poignant photograph The Road Ahead (1997) carries new meaning with the uncertainty of what is to come.
Gerard Byrne & Willie Doherty in FRONT International
14 July – 30 September 2018
Gerard Byrne and Willie Doherty will both be included in the inaugural FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, titled An American City.
Willie Doherty, REMAINS
Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, Ireland
10 July – 22 September 2018
Willie Doherty REMAINS will present photographic and video work.
Willie Doherty & Brian Maguire in Outposts
Glucksman, Cork, Ireland
1 December 2017 – 11 March 2018
Group exhibition curated by Chris Clarke and Fiona Kearney, in association with Professor Nuala Finnegan, Head of the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studios, UCC. Artists: Katharina Cibulka, Willie Doherty, Dragana Jurisic, Bouchra Khalili, Brian Maguire, Teresa Margolles, Dara McGrath, Larissa Sansour, Hrair Sarkissian, Javier Téllez, Jun Yang.
TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art 2017
Benefit Auction, Dallas
28 October 2017
Kerlin Gallery is delighted to participate in this year's TWO x TWO auction, which raises money for the AIDs research foundation amfAR and the Dallas Museum of Art. For the 2017 benefit auction, Kerlin Gallery will donate artworks by Willie Doherty and William McKeown.
Willie Doherty in Truth: 24 frames per second
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas
22 October 2017 – 28 January 2018
Exhibition with Ant Farm, Dara Birnbaum, Mark Bradford, James Coleman, Phil Collins, Bruce Conner, Willie Doherty, Omer Fast, Morgan Fisher, Coco Fusco, Tatiana Gaviola, John Gerrard, Arthur Jafa, Zoe Leonard & Catherine Gund, Steve McQueen, Shirin Neshat, Pratibha Parmar, Ben Rivers, Rachel Rose, Anri Sala, Chick Strand, Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Anne Tallentire, and Rosemarie Trockel.
Willie Doherty & Paul Seawright in so it is
Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
7 April – 7 August 2017
Artists: Ursula Burke, Willie Doherty, Rita Duffy, John Kindness, Locky Morris, Philip Napier, and Paul Seawright. Curated by John Carson.
Periodical Review 20/16
Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin
Selected by Brian Duggan, Sarah Glennie, Jenny Haughton & Declan Long. Artists include Aquinas, Callan Workhouse, Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, Dorothy Cross, Willie Doherty, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Fergus Feehily, FOUR, Anthony Haughey, Des Kenny, Patrick Jolley & Reynold Reynolds, Aileen Lambert, Clare Langan, The Metropolitan Complex, Michael McLoughlin, Isabel Nolan, Seamus Nolan, Emer O'Boyle, Margaret O' Brien, Deirdre O'Mahony.
Willie Doherty, Loose Ends
Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny
10 July – 24 September 2016
Loose Ends is a new commission by Willie Doherty exploring how people, events and places associated with the 1916 Easter Rising are remembered and imagined today.
IMMA Collection: A Decade
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
28 April 2016 - 8 January 2017
Works by Willie Doherty, Elizabeth Magill and Brian Maguire are among those included in IMMA Collection: A Decade, an exhibition of some of the highlights from IMMA's collection over the past ten years.
Willie Doherty, Home
14 February – 24 April 2016
Villa Merkel, Esslingen am Neckar, Germany
New and recent video and photographic works by Willie Doherty will be included in this exhibition at Villa Merkel (near Stuttgart).
Willie Doherty, Again and Again
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, CAM, Lisbon, Portugal
20 November 2015 – 22 February 2016
Solo exhibition
Willie Doherty is the suject of a new solo exhibition in Lisbon's Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Curated by Isabel Carlos.
Willie Doherty
The Margulies Collection at the WAREhOUSE
28 October 2015 – 30 April 2016
Group exhibition
Willie Doherty's Extracts From a File will be on display as part of The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse's permanent collection.
Willie Doherty in Longing for happier times
Kröller-Müller Museum, The Netherlands
19 September 2015 – 3 January 2016
Group exhibition
Work by Willie Doherty is to be included in Longing for happier times: Media works from the collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum.
Willie Doherty, UNSEEN
De Pont Museum, The Netherlands
20 September 2014 - 18 January 2015
The exhibition will provide a critical overview of Willie Doherty’s photographs and videos made on the streets of his native city of Derry in Northern Ireland and its surrounding hinterland, presenting new insight into the artist’s working methods and rationale.
Dorothy Cross, Willie Doherty, Siobhan Hapaska, William McKeown, Paul Seawright, New Art New Nature
Ulster Museum
10 October 2014 - 28 June 2015
A new exhibition examining the role of nature in the work of Irish and International artists over the past seventy years opens to the public at the Ulster Museum. New Art, New Nature includes work by world-renowned figures including Henri Matisse, William Scott and Willie Doherty. Paintings by one of Northern Ireland’s most important artists of the last century, William McKeown, will also be displayed at the museum for the first time, together with work by Dorothy Cross, Siobhan Hapaska and Paul Seawright amongst others.
Willie Doherty, Punctum
Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg
26 July–21 September 2014
Punctum is an exhibition exploring the nature of photography today. Consisting of 50 works chosen by artists, curators and writers, and including a series of lectures and a publication, Punctum takes its cue from the term “punctum” coined by Roland Barthes in his final book, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Punctum is curated by Séamus Kealy and artist Duncan Campbell selected Willie Doherty.
Willie Doherty
Willie Doherty and the Huis Marseille Collection
14 December 2013 - 9 March2014
Huis Marseille Museum voor Fotografie, Amsterdam
Huis Marseille Museum voor Fotografie has recently acquired for its collection two large works by artist Willie Doherty – Seepage and To the Border, A Fork in the Road....
The exhibition showcasing works by Willie Doherty and other artists whose work has also recently been acquired by Huis Marseille will open on 14 December.
Willie Doherty
Unseen
27 September 2013 - 4 January 2014
City Factory Gallery, Derry
UNSEEN is a major exhibition of photographic and video works by Willie Doherty which opens 27 September at the City Factory Gallery, Derry and will form part of the city's 2013 Derry-Londonderry City of Culture celebrations.
Willie Doherty, Secretion
The Annex, IMMA @ NCH Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2
21 May - 1 September 2013
A haunting film work by leading Derry-born artist Willie Doherty opens to the public in the Annex at the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s temporary off-site exhibition spaces in Earlsfort Terrace on Tuesday 21 May 2013.
Secretion, 2012, first shown to critical acclaim at dOCUMENTA 13, draws on the possibilities of lost and forgotten narratives located somewhere between recent history and a near future.
Willie Doherty, Concrete : Photography and Architecture
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland
2 March - 20 May 2013
Fotomuseum Winterthur presents Concrete - Photography and Architecture, a photographic group show which explores the relationship between architecture and photography. This exhibition, curated by Thomas Seelig, features work by Willie Doherty amonst others, and runs until 20 May.
Willie Doherty, Looking at the View
Tate Britain, London
12 February 2013 - 02 June 2013
Willie Doherty is amonst the artists presenting work in this exhibition which looks at continuities in the way artists have framed our vision of the landscape over the last 300 years.
Willie Doherty, dOCUMENTA (13)
09 June 2012 - 16 September 2012
Kassel, Germany
Kerlin Gallery is pleased to announce Willie Doherty's participation in dOCUMENTA (13) with the premiere of his new video installation 'Secretion' .
Artforum
Willie Doherty, Alexander and Bonin
September 2017
Although human presence in No Return is strictly limited, community is a vital issue for Doherty. Walking the deserted streets, the narrator senses their former inhabitants and feels like an intruder, "my presence an affront to the lives pf those who had lived and died here". He drifts from analysing the town's pollutant-induced collapse – which he realises is irreversible – to exploring the community's past life.—David Frankel
BFI
Willie Doherty’s Loose Ends: revolution remembered
14 July 2017
The images of Loose Ends could hardly be more remote from any familiar iconography of the Easter Rising, matched by the meditative commentary voiced by Séan McGinley. Gola’s miniature landscape is archetypal rural Ireland, framed by a rough stone window opening. And its rocky Atlantic coast might seem merely picturesque, although the yacht Asgard faced heavy storms on its mission. Moore Street today is a derelict city terrace, boarded up and host to a variety of weeds and decay. Anti-heroic, or a wry view of the futility of memorialisation? The text muses on time, decay and the inevitable fictionalisation of the past.—Ian Christie
Visit WebsiteArtReview
Willie Doherty, Unseen
"Since the mid-1980s Doherty has been predominantly walking through, interrogating and excavating one site: Derry in Nothern Ireland, the place of his birth. It is a complex city divided in two ways. By religious allegiances, sharply defined through politics, separatist ideologies and a long history of violence; and by the River Foyle, a wide, powerful waterway that effectively divides the city into two urban islands. Unseen, a serious and quietly moving retrospective, spans 27 years of Doherty’s career. It presents an unparalleled portrait of his hometown, reaching the metaphysical territories of identity, memory and being that lie beneath its concrete surfaces …"
Morgan Quaintance
Art Review, January & February 2014
frieze
Willie Doherty, Unseen
"As the title of Willie Doherty’s mini-retrospective at City Factory Gallery makes clear, much of the sectarian logic of this city is ‘UNSEEN’. This is Doherty’s hometown, and has been one of the principal subjects of his work for the past 30 years. While most photojournalists have presented the city as the setting for violent confrontations (youths throwing petrol bombs, lines of riot police bearing down on them), Doherty depicts places not people, sites rather than sights. The earlier works on show are black and white photographs with definitive statements printed in bold capitals across their surfaces. Here, the landscape itself is a locus for ethno-religious division. In the diptych Stone Upon Stone (1986), for example, the Republican slogan ‘TIOCFAIDH ÁR LÁ’ (Gaelic for ‘Our day will come’) appears on one image and the Unionist slogan ‘THIS WE WILL MAINTAIN’ on the other. If there is a passing resemblance to British Land art, to certain pieces by Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, Doherty’s work is motivated by different concerns: his images are a counterpoint to media spectacle rather than a record of wanderlust."
Colin Perry
frieze, Issue 161, March 2014
ArtReview
Willie Doherty, Galerie Peter Kichmann
"Willie Doherty’s Without Trace (2013) is one of the few films the artist has created outside of his native Northern Ireland. The thirteen-minute video work (alongside an accompanying series of photographs) observes a shallow waterway limning the terrain, the underside of Zurich’s arterial roads and new housing and building sites. Everything is covered in a fine, dampening blanket of snow. A female voice tells the tale of a migrant construction worker who, prior to his disappearance, had been possessed by growing disquiet regarding the city. This man believed the ground beneath him harboured secrets that surfaced only rarely as a result of excavation, upheaval or thaw."
Aoife Rosenmeyer
ArtReview, 16 April 2013
Artforum
Close-Up: Swamp Thing
"The world of Willie Doherty’s Secretion, 2012, is entropic and still, a place where little moves. Set up visually as a sequence of views of woods, waters, and a deserted house, the video might perhaps have come off as pastoral if shot in breezy sunshine but speaks instead of stagnation and decay. Shooting on windless days of gray light, Doherty finds fungi, lichens, and damp leaf litter in the dank forest, and growths, molds, and creeping mildews in the crumbling house. The only thing in motion is running water, but running water spreading spores of algae, or screened by a milky film. Combining these images with a spoken text telling a story of morbidity and corruption, Doherty makes a fallen tree look as sinister as a razor in a slasher film."
David Frankel
Artforum, September 2013, pp. 348–349
Art Monthly
Dublin Round-up
"Few artists are as adept at instilling dread and disquiet as Willie Doherty. His 2012 film Secretion, originally made for Documenta 13, is currently being screened at the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s premises at Earlsfort Terrace. It dominates the building’s Annex gallery, and this allowance of space invites one to appreciate the subtle, ambient soundtrack and vivid, close-up depictions of mould and fungus. An elusive, ambiguous commentary unfolds against Doherty’s imagery, tracing the effects of a mysterious outbreak that infects first woodlands, then nearby houses and eventually the character of ‘X’, the occupant of one such domicile and the guard of a detainee facility for those affected. With the relentless spread of the virus into waterways and reservoirs, he escapes to a life of solitude and ‘the festering interior of his house’. Doherty refrains from showing any of this, dwelling instead on lingering shots of rotting foliage, dead trees, mildew and must, damp and decay, as the commentary doubles back to question the verifiability of its own account: ‘’As his condition worsened he was frequently visited by hallucinations. Deep pools of dark water opened up around him … It was as if he had never completed his escape.’ The absence of an identifiable protagonist and the suffocating atmosphere of the footage seems to permeate the viewer; one imagines the insidious creep of the disease, gradually filling and contaminating the surrounding air of the vast screening area. While, to some extent, Doherty remains inevitably associated with the similarly unsettling films he made about Northern Ireland, Secretion represents a compelling shift in his practice, away from the historical specificity of the Troubles yet, in its own way, just as troubling."
Chris Clarke
Art Monthly, September 2013, p. 33
Art Agenda
Willie Doherty, Unseen
"Unseen, the title of Willie Doherty’s first retrospective in his hometown of Derry, refers to a complex set of impossibilities at the core of his photographic and video practice. The exhibition is accompanied by a substantial, three-hundred-page catalog in which Robin Klassnik, the director of Matt’s Gallery in London and co-curator of the exhibition, asserts that Unseen refers to Doherty’s need to make work in such a way as to remain out of sight, unremarkable to the all-seeing eyes of the British military that has so famously surveilled Northern Ireland and Derry. Unseen also points to a central feature of the artist’s work: his early photographs and later videos offer us carefully crafted tensions and contradictions that hide as much as they reveal about the gloomy countrysides and bleak cityscapes they depict. After having been exhibited across the world, these images of and from Derry are brought back to their place of origin on an unprecedented scale. As a result, the derelict city streets and haunted country lanes that are implacable for a non-native of the city are now presented to audiences with first-hand knowledge of these spaces and their untold stories."
Aileen Burns and John Lundh
Art Agenda, 18 November 2013
The Guardian
Artist of the week: Willie Doherty
"Born in Derry in 1959, Doherty has devoted the past 30 years to making art about the Troubles. His practice has evolved from early black-and-white photographs of his home town, in which he sought to recontextualise the city away from the cliched and gritty photojournalistic images in the press, to film installations. Some focused directly on the political impasse, while others were more metaphorical, often using film noir to convey the city's chilling beauty. The Only Good One Is a Dead One, shot at night through the lamp-lit streets of Derry, captured the cool, calculating horror of organised crime as a man switches between the voice of a stalker and a victim."
Jessica Lack
The Guardian, 22 April 2009
frieze
Willie Doherty, Matt's Gallery
"Language is an important element in all the videos shown in this mini-retrospective. The voice-overs are redolent of late Samuel Beckett – an even, toneless (nearly always Northern Irish-accented) delivery that conceals its own textual texture."
Maria Fusco
frieze, Issue 114, April 2008, p. 171
frieze
Trans-Europe Express
"At the risk of being accused of blatant chauvinism, the adjacent presentations of Ireland and Northern Ireland, by Gerard Byrne and Willie Doherty, were a joint success among the outlying ‘national pavilions’. Doherty’s film Ghost Story (2007) retained the baggage of a life lived in violent times even as it journeyed into a spectral other-world, while Byrne’s fractured restaging of scenes from a mid-1960s’ sci-fi think-tank, 1984 and Beyond (2006), presented the tomorrow’s world of yesteryear from the ironically distancing perspective of today."
Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith
frieze, Issue 109, September 2007
frieze
Willie Doherty, Matt's Gallery
"It worked. For days after seeing Willie Doherty’s new video installation, I walked the streets of London gripped by involuntary suspicion - wondering about cars idling quietly at the ends of poorly lit alleyways, doing double takes at vaguely conspiritorial street corner meetings, trying to pick out surveillance cameras hanging above urban junctions."
Jeffrey Kastner
frieze, January 1994