NYAB Event - Desire Obtain Cherish “We Are Known By The Company We Keep”

Desire Obtain Cherish “We Are Known By The Company We Keep”

Unix Gallery

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As a leading pop sculptor, Desire Obtain Cherish (DOC) works across a wide variety of different media to create art that both validates and critiques the cycle of consumerism alluded to in his pseudonym. His controversial and self aware work combines pop, street, conceptual, and appropriation art to explore contemporary society’s unrelenting obsession with sex, drugs, luxury, media, and fame. “We Are Known By The Company We Keep” explores a more acute subsection of our consumer culture - the art world. Desire Obtain Cherish takes on critics, historians, gallerists, and collectors. The artist recalls an encounter with a collector as a preface for his newest body of work: A well dressed art collector leaned over to me during dinner one night after a friend’s gallery opening in Chelsea and whispered, “Wanna hear a little story?” I said, “Sure.” “A story of two gentlemen,” he said. “Each has a yacht, each has houses on different continents, each has more cars than they can drive, and more watches than they can wear. But what one man has that the other man doesn’t is a Rothko. A Rothko that used to be owned by David Rockefeller.” “Sounds like the collector is more important than the artist,” I said. He smiled wryly and gave me a hard wink.

Jonathan Paul, aka Desire Obtain Cherish, was born in 1975 in Salinas, California. Paul graduated from Parson’s School of Design with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts. Since his first solo show at Lab Art Street Gallery in Los Angeles (2011), he has been featured in numerous international shows and fairs. DOC lives and works in Los Angeles.