The Kerlin Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Willie Doherty. In previous slide and video installations Doherty has frequently used the human figure. UNKNOWN MALE SUBJECT is the artist's first body of photographic work that features the human figure prominently and directly.

All of the photographs depict the same young man but the viewer is left to speculate about his age, nationality, character and his actions and intentions. While the photographs, on the face of it, conform to the conventions of portraiture, they frustrate our expectations of a portrait as an insight into the personality, social context and even the spiritual essence of the subject. Doherty's UNKNOWN MALE SUBJECT remains not just unknown but unknowable. He exists in the marginal spaces familiar to Doherty's earlier works, in the outskirts of the city, along border roads, in the shadows of street lights and between

day and night.

Willie Doherty has exhibited extensively throughout the world receiving widespread critical acclaim for many solo exhibitions such as 'True Nature' at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, 'Somewhere Else', at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 'Dark Stains' at the Koldo Mitexelena Kulturunea, San Sebastian, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, the Kunstalle, Bern, the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon and the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 1993 Doherty represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale and won the 1995 Irish Museum of Modern Art/Glen Dimplex Artist's Award. In 2001 Doherty represented Britain in the San Paulo Biennale.

A major exhibition of Doherty's work selected from the past 25 years will open at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on October 30. The exhibition entitled 'False Memory' will be accompanied by a comprehensive full-colour catalogue, published by Merrell publishers and IMMA.