DUVE Berlin proudly presents the first solo exhibition of New York based artist, Dave McDermott. The show entitled *The Modern Temper* presents new works of sculpture and collages, alongside a series of multi layered monochromatic paintings on museum board titled, *You Look Great When I'm Fucked Up*.
In *The Modern Temper* McDermott addresses notions of duality, through an exploration of the two prominent aesthetic ideals found in post war through contemporary culture, the plastic and the organic. In all the works presented, McDermott uses history, both personal and broad, as a material to be broken down and reconstructed. Compressing different histories together, the works in the exhibition have a haunted quality, reminding us of a time and place that may have existed only in part, or not at all.
Central to the show are a series of monochromatic paintings on board entitled, *You Look Great When I'm Fucked Up*. Each board in the series is painted with a gestural abstraction in white gesso as the base coat and then covered with a nitrocellulose lacquer. These white abstractions are then painted with a different coloured lacquer from the Fender guitar line from the 1960's, a period when Fender took to painting their guitars with high-end automotive lacquers that were used in the American automotive industry at that time. These colour selections are historically personal to McDermott as they are selected from guitars owned by himself or his friends during the time he was working as a musician in Los Angeles, California in the 1990's.