£2,500
Contemporary & Post-War Art // Prints & Multiples | 687
Auction: Contemporary & Post-War Art
Signed and dated '98 on label below chin, matchsticks on a metal base
Note: David Mach was born in Fife and studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee and the Royal College of Art, London. As well as this rigorous artistic training, time spent working on the factory floor and in industrial yards would exert a significant influence in the direction of his artistic output, which was generally realised on an extremely large-scale utilising repeats of ordinary everyday objects. In an interview with the Royal Academy, Mach recalled that ‘in the 1980s I was creating massive installations made up of thousands of magazines. At one show, a guy came up to me and said he had always wanted to buy my work but never could because it was too big;’ on reflection, ‘that was an epiphany for me.’ From then on Mach has worked across scales, still generating ambitious large-scale commissions but also much smaller, more accessible pieces like the Matchhead series.
The sculpture Head is a multi-coloured, patterned skull made up of coloured, unstruck matchsticks, probably sourced from Japan. The ordinariness of the component objects, in this case the matchsticks, but often also wire coat hangers, magazine pages, tyres or bricks belies the laborious nature of turning them into the artworks and the visual extravagance of the end result of Mach’s work. Head is visually arresting, a classical skull transformed into a richly-coloured and patterned piece of modernity. The uniformity and repetition of the matchsticks and the symmetry and coherence generated is particularly compelling, with a real tactility, yet the threat of combustion is always present. A skull invokes notions of death and this entire structure is made of items designed to spark flames but it is simultaneously steeped in humour and fun. How could a sculpture made entirely of brightly coloured matchsticks take itself too seriously?