When Brian McCann arrived in Liverpool to be artist-inresidence at Tate Gallery Liverpool he was struck by a certain character in the city which he has defined as a sense of 'recognition'. 'Recognition' was a notion or theme which had been in his mind since he had finished his previous work in the spring of 1988. For McCann the kind of recognition encountered in Liverpool became a metaphor for human vulnerability. It represented a certain honesty and a lack of pretence. It was a sense of recognition of the inevitability of the situation.
This series of recent drawings revolves around man's lot in life. It is about a general rather than an individual condition, but also about the enforced role of the individual within the group. McCann links man's lot with his mark; a mark which both signifies the role society has assigned him and the individual's creative wish to make a mark for posterity. Aware of the potential condescension associated with such a stance, McCann plays on this, using stereotypes to question our responses to them; using a standardized process but individualizing it. Although the drawings exploit McCann's interest in the Press as both subject and medium, the primary stimulus in Liverpool has been from life. The drawings are about how we see and read the world, and McCann hopes that they betray an artist's recognition of this duality.
A specific locality is the background to these drawings, a locality in which the sculptor identifies an unusual sense of 'self-recognition'. Such an identification is purely personal, and the series reflects this interplay between an individual subjectivity and that individual's identification of a wider one.
Brian McCann was born in Glasgow in 1952. He studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee and the Royal College of Art. He has been awarded a number of prizes and scholarships since 1977, he was Picker Fellow in Sculpture at Kingston Polytechnic in 1983, and won a Rome Scholarship in 1984. He has participated in group shows at the Paris/Marseille Biennale (1983), Serpentine Gallery (1983), Bisonte Gallery, Florence (1985), City Artists Gallery, London (1987), and the Salo Uno Gallery, Rome (1988). He has had one-man shows in the Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh (1983), Kingston Polytechnic (1984),369 Gallery, Edinburgh (1986) and at the Salisbury Festival (1988). He took up residence at Tate Liverpool in January of this year as the first holder of the MoMart Fellowship.