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APU150
Paul Murphy
3 April
- 2 May 2004
Private View Friday 2 April 6-9pm
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A
joke with another artist at a private view about there being too many
white faces on the walls of Londons art galleries becomes the
motivation: to show 150 drawings of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the manager
of the Kwik-E-Mart in The Simpsons. But this isnt
a joke and with each drawing the artist becomes more deeply involved,
finding new twists. |
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Apu150
is 150 ticks in the Any Other Asian Background box on
an ethnic monitoring form or the identically faced hordes of foreigners
in a Daily Mail scare story, setting out to obliterate
the dominant culture by duplication and reproduction, a veritable
army of grinning Apus. But its also about the act of repetition
in art, the artist constantly working in the gap between the real
and the representation, going over the ground again and again with
the compulsion of the obsessive. |
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The
drawings are all based on a mass-produced plastic Burger King figure
of Apu given away in its millions with Burger King Childrens
Meals. They incorporate a variety of found, recycled, discarded and
reclaimed media: paint tester pots, biros from bookies, boards from
skips, donated pieces of wood and Tippex from the stationery cupboard
at work. The palette of much of the work is based on the colours often
used to describe (and categorise and separate) skin colours (black,
white, yellow, brown and so on)
but in their garishness bear no relationship to what a piece of skin
might actually look like. |
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The
drawings start off simply, a few outlines, a moustache and a quiff
are enough to define the character, but from this opening, the series
progresses and an angry, darker, brooding, more malevolent Apu emerges,
one more complex and unable to simply disappear into the background
of the culture in which he finds himself. |
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