Roisin Byrne

In her work, the artist quotes from German conceptual artist Jochem Hendricks’s well-known work Tax (2000), which is based on a simple idea – Hendricks calculated the amount of tax he had to pay, bought gold in that amount, and declared his act to be a work of conceptual art. Because the gold thus became artistic material, its purchase price was tax deductible, and the artist paid no taxes as a result. Byrne “pulls a Hendricks” of her own – not only in the sense that the material outcome of both conceptual pieces is gold bars (though smaller in the second case), but above all in the fact that she uses a similar approach bordering on legality (see the correspondence that is a part of the work). Both Hendricks and Byrne thus subversively violate the established mechanisms for making art, as well as the status of artwork itself.
Marcel Fišer