XXXXL Face No. 5 Big T (Debbie)

JOHN DOVE AND MOLLY WHITE

Debbie

inscribed 'GREAT FACE T-SHIRT N°5' (on the original cardboard box)

archival ink digital print on cotton doublelock T-shirt with alloy hanger with anodised finish in original cardboard box

T-shirt: c. 126 x 82 3/4 inches (320 x 210 cm)

hanger: 65 x 33 7/8 inches (165 x 86 cm)

overall (displayed with hanger): 124 x 96 7/8 inches (315 × 246 cm)

Executed in 2015. Accompanied by a signed and dated certificate of authenticity.

Debbie (2015) inaugurates Dove and White's Big-T Multiple series — the XXXXL format, first introduced at Kitsch-22, 22 Woodstock Street, London in 1976–77 alongside Bowie (Face No. 1), Siouxsie (No. 2), Jordan (No. 3) and Johnny Rotten. The Face series was conceived around the idea of urban tribal make-up: face-paint printed separately from the bleached portrait, as an abstract pattern read as the new face-paint of the tribes of London.

The image was derived from a cassette tape advertisement, photographed by the artists with an Olympus Trip camera and transferred onto film with black overpainting — a characteristically low-fi process applied to an image that has since become one of the most celebrated faces in popular culture.

The XXXXL Big T format — the printed T-shirt scaled to wall-sculpture proportions and presented on a custom anodised-alloy hanger — is one of Dove and White's signature gestures, translating the artists' wearable-art idiom of the 1970s into a stable, gallery-format object. At a printed area of approximately 320 × 210 cm and a display height of more than three metres when hung, Debbie is the largest of the Face series Big Ts in scale, and one of the most fully realised statements in Dove and White's post-2000 practice. Presented as a wall sculpture, the work is delivered in the artists' original cardboard box — itself inscribed GREAT FACE T-SHIRT N°5 — with the signed and dated certificate of authenticity.

PROVENANCE:

From the personal archive of John Dove and Molly White