Anne Doran
Black Mondays
June 18–July 29, 2022

MARCH is pleased to announce our first solo presentation of works by Anne Doran. Begun shortly after the stock market crash on October 19, 1987, this series has been decades in the making. Now, while the whole world is talking about inflation, supply-chain issues, and shortages, Doran’s paintings feel uncannily of the moment.

On October 19, 1987, a chain reaction of market distress caused stock exchanges across the globe to plummet in a matter of hours, including America’s most prominent index, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which dropped 22.6 percent—a loss that remains the largest one-day stock market decline in history. Anne Doran was thirty years old at the time, working at an independent record company and making art. Hearing news of the crash, she immediately started on a mixed-media work, the first in a long-running series that she titled “Black Mondays”… read more

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S&P 500 Large Cap Index, December 30, 1988.

“Doran profits from the curious old-yet-new quality of her prescient, long-simmering works, whose acuity and dark humor transcend time and bend space.”

 

–The New Yorker, 2017

Anne Doran, Analog (study for sculpture), c. mid-1990s. Image courtesy of the artist & Invisible Exports.

“I had a circular for Woolworth’s Dollar Days lying around that I’d liked the look of, and suddenly it all came together for me. I picked it up, traced the outlines of three of my collages onto it, and painted them in with black Flashe.”

–Anne Doran

A collage by Anne Doran titled Black Monday (50% Off Every Item On This Page), dated 1988.
A collage by Anne Doran titled Black Monday (Our Lowest Prices of the Season), dated 2022.
A collage by Anne Doran titled Black Monday (Dairy Delights I), dated 2022.

“Doran, along with such artists as Cady Noland, Gretchen Bender and Jennifer Bolande, were a kind of second-wave Pictures Generation, attentive to methods of display as well as the increasing speed at which images were being produced and consumed.”

–Art in America, 2014

Press Release

Anne Doran

Black Mondays

June 18–July 29, 2022

 

On October 19, 1987, a chain reaction of market distress caused stock exchanges across the globe to plummet in a matter of hours, including America’s most prominent index, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which dropped 22.6 percent—a loss that remains the largest one-day stock market decline in history. Anne Doran was thirty years old at the time, working at an independent record company and making art. Hearing news of the crash, she immediately started on a mixed-media work, the first in a long-running series that she titled “Black Mondays”.

Previous to that day, Doran had been primarily occupied with making collage-based sculptures informed by the American culture of the 1980s and early 1990s, years in which Ronald Reagan was elected twice, the AIDS epidemic reached crisis proportions, and feminism came under fire from the right. At the same time, the rise of neoliberalism—an ideology now seen as fostering economic inequality and environmental degradation globally—was being reflected in a proliferation of mass media images that solidified structures of power through the amplification of desire. Influenced, like many of her peers, by the Pictures generation, Doran was working with found images from any number of printed sources—including corporate reports, porn magazines, military and fashion magazines, and advertising circulars—fragmenting and recombining them as a way to subvert their messages and create alternative stories.

It is the last of these materials that provide the surface for all of Doran’s Black Monday paintings. According to the artist: “I had a circular for Woolworth’s Dollar Days lying around that I’d liked the look of, and suddenly it all came together for me. I picked it up, traced the outlines of three of my collages onto it, and painted them in with black Flashe.” These redactions simultaneously reproduced her collages and freed them from the burden of specific images, even as they paradoxically drew attention to what they obliterated—the stuff of everyday life.

The events of Black Monday brought attention to globalization, a new phenomenon at the time, by demonstrating the unprecedented extent to which financial markets worldwide had become intertwined and technologically interconnected. This process has, of course, accelerated over the past few decades. Now, while the whole world is talking about inflation, supply-chain issues, and shortages, Doran’s paintings feel uncannily of the moment.

Anne Doran (b. 1957) was born in Canada and lives and works in New York. Her work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA P.S.1, Long Island City, NY; The Kitchen, New York; Artists Space, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and 303 Gallery, New York and has been reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Village Voice, among other publications.

 

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