Berlin-based artist Brad Downey returned to Cuadro Gallery with Damaged Goods, presenting a multi-media cabinet of curiosities made by the artist. The show, which merges new video art and site-specific installations with previous work, takes a humorous yet introspective look at questions of authorship, ownership, and artistic illusion. 

Most well-known for his anarchic transformations of street environments, Brad Downey is in fact one of the most highly versatile proponents of Independent Public Art, an artist who has created a wide body of work as comical as it is contentious, bitingly critical and humorous in equal measure.

What links all of Downey’s projects however is a concern with the customs and conventions of the urban environment, the norms which have become so embedded that they are perceived as exactly that, as proper or suitable rather than prohibitive or invasive: It is hence the “lack of discourse around rules in general” which is important for Downey, the general failure to “question our surroundings and reality” that becomes the starting point for his work. Whether he is confiscating CCTV cameras or filling phone boxes full of balloons then, building sculptures from car-tires or impaling bicycles (as if by magic) half-way up telephone polls, Downey aims to take existing objects and “give them a different function and purpose”, changing their “composition or orientation”, shifting their meaning. 

CUADRO GALLERY

Location: Building 10 – DIFC, Gate Village, Dubai UAE

runs until 9th of DEcC