In this exhibition, Patrick Duegaw enlists a childhood game, Five Lines, where random scribbles are drawn on a blank page to become the inventive jumping-off point. Part cloud-busting, part Rorschach test, this version of the game explores the power of drawing and intent, as interpreted through the epic poem The Twelve Labours of Hercules.
The five lines, drawn on blank ‘plates’, are transformed into ink drawings, illuminated drawings, and a series of lithographs where the original five marks are printed in red ink, in order to emphasize the generative creative process. The result becomes The Trials of the Golden Rat, depicting mythical animal-human hybrids in tales of ignorance, manipulation and control, intolerance, hubris, greed; and, conversely, of justice and acceptance.
Artist Bio
Patrick Duegaw (b. 1966) opened his last museum exhibition, Pierced by Dogma, at the Ulrich Museum of Art in spring of 2017. Past solo gallery exhibitions include Flouting the Binary in BILDLAB in 2019 and Study (an exhibition of study drawings for the Innumerable Anxieties) in 2017, both at Fisch Haus; and Innumerable Anxieties at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center in the winter of 2014 and the Lawrence Art Center in the spring of 2015. Inadvertent Arson, at the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, opened in the fall of 2012, and Duegaw participated, with Paul Mahder Gallery, in the 2013 ArtPad SF.
Recent group exhibitions include A Fine Line: Masterworks in Drawing, at Paul Mahder Gallery in summer of 2016; Dialogue: Modern and Contemporary Drawings from the WAM Collection, at the Wichita Art Museum in winter of 2016; Face to Face, Wall to Wall, at the Yellowstone Museum of Art in spring of 2014; and Forty Years/Forty Stories at the Ulrich Museum of Art, in spring and summer of 2014. In 2011, his work was featured in FH:21: a major exhibition at the Ulrich Museum of Art, celebrating the twenty-first anniversary of Fisch Haus.
Duegaw’s first solo museum exhibition, The Builder, Removed, a comprehensive retrospective of 111 paintings and drawings, was held at the Wichita Art Museum in the spring of 2009. A gallery production of Jurgen and The Wrong Tools, a Still Play Installation opened in June of 2011 at the Paul Mahder Gallery in San Francisco, and also at the LA Art Show in January earlier that year. The Still Play, The Wrong Tools (For The Job), opened at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center in April 2010.
Duegaw has had eight large-scale solo multi-media exhibitions at Fisch Haus, regularly exhibits in galleries in both Kansas City and San Francisco, and has been invited to participate in national group shows such as the Kansas Masters Invitational, and the Kansas Governor’s Ball/Inauguration Exhibition.
