Artists

Adam Dant

Adam Dant (b. Cambridge, UK, 1967) studied at the Royal College of Art, London (1989-91) and the MS University Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda, India (1988). In 2002 he received the Jerwood Drawing Prize for his Anecdotal Plan of Tate Britain. Dant lives and works in London.

Selected solo shows include Hayward Gallery (London), Adam Baumgold Gallery (New York), Hales Gallery (London), Galerie Brighi (Paris). Selected group exhibitions include Tate Modern (London), MoMA New York, Victoria Miro (London). Dant's work can be found in numerous public and private collections including The Arts Council Collection (UK), The V&A (UK), The Museum of London (UK), The Government Art Collection (UK), MoMA (New York), Deutsche Bank (Germany), The Musee d'Art Contemporain (Lyon) and the San Diego Museum of Art (US).

Dant creates dense and elaborate drawings, thoroughly researched and often possessed of a dysfunctional, semicircular logic. He has acquired a reputation as a creator of "mockuments". These are works based on floor plans of the Louvre, the National Gallery and Tate Britain, in which flowcharts lead from image to image to create a psycho-history of the institution being anatomized. Mishap and folly proliferate his work and he has been described as someone who "delights in serious craziness that pokes fun at our contemporary media by proposing charismatically strange alternative perspectives".

Museums are a common subject in Dant's pieces, as are maps and complicated jokes. Through his peculiar approach he addresses issues such as ideology, politics and even elements of British culture. Dant's recent works often take the form of large brush and ink drawings and have been described as Hogarthian or Swiftian especially in relation to his use of satire. These drawings continue his interest in depicting and interacting with the public space, the anecdotal and utopian grand models.

Between 1995 and 2000, Dant acted as an 18th century style pamphleteer, producing and distributing Donald Parsnips' Daily Journal. Some nine hundred editions of the pocket-sized, eight paged journals were produced, never constrained to format, all are utterly unique, and as a collection have become an important document of the London scene in the 1990s. Dant recently curated Hackney Hoard (Galerie8, London, 2011); an idea that formed after a mysterious golden coin was found near his home in Hackney. In 2003, he founded The Bureau for the Investigation of the Subliminal Image and in 2005, The Guild of Neologists.