David Mach

David Mach (born 18 March 1956) is a Scottish sculptor and installation artist.

Mach's artistic style is based on flowing assemblages of mass-produced found art objects. Typically these include magazines,vicious teddy bears,newspapers, car tyres, match sticks and coat hangers. Many of his installations are temporary and constructed in public spaces.

One example of his early magazine pieces, Adding Fuel to the Fire, was an installation assembled from an old truck and several cars surrounded and subsumed by about 100 tons of magazines, individually arranged to create the impression that the vehicles were being caught in an explosion of flames and billowing smoke.

An early influential sculpture was Polaris, exhibited outside the Royal Festival Hall, South Bank Centre, London in 1983. This consisted of some 6000 car tyres arranged as a lifesize replica of a Polaris submarine. Mach intended it as a protest against the nuclear arms race meant to stir controversy. A member of the public who took exception to the piece tried to burn it down; unfortunately, he got caught in the flames himself and suffered fatal burns.

In the early 1980s Mach started to produce some smaller-scale works assembled out of unstruck match stick. These mostly took the form of human or animalistic heads and masks, with the coloured tips of the match heads arranged to construct the patterned surface of the face. After accidentally setting fire to one of these heads, Mach now often ignites...
Read More