Irish artist and punk musician Guggi has a little-known fact about Bono and himself that he likes to divulge.
“I gave Bono his name, and he gave me my name. He said, ‘It doesn’t just describe something of your physicality, and it doesn’t just describe something of your essence. It’s a painter’s name.’
“As young kids, we were fascinated by the idea of finding a word that sounds the way somebody looks, something of their physicality. We had this humorous thing, naming people,” Guggi told WWD in an interview Friday. It was a mechanism that helped get him through each day, as one of 10 children in his family, growing up in a working class community sandwiched by two rough areas.
“I don’t really have any memory of Bono not being my friend. He was 3 and I was 4 when we started hanging out — and we never stopped hanging out,” Guggi told WWD. “We backed each other up in the tough old days of living in a rough area sometimes with our fists, sometimes just covering our heads if we were attacked by a gang. But yeah, he’s my oldest mate.”
Guggi’s life (his real name is Derek Rowan) — including his years performing in the punk band The Virgin Prunes and later as an abstract painter and sculptor depicting everyday objects like urns, bowls and vessels — is chronicled in a documentary directed by Ian Thuillier titled “Guggi.” It premieres Saturday at the Tribeca Film Festival and will subsequently play at the Village East.
Guggi has exhibited worldwide since the 1990s, with solo exhibitions at the Château La Coste in France, the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York, and the Galerie Yoshii Tokyo, among other galleries and museums.
On Nov. 2, Guggi shows at Pucci International at 44 West 18th Street in Manhattan, introducing the artist’s first furniture collection, created in collaboration with the Pucci studio, of coffee tables, consoles, and side tables in steel and plasterglass, either gold-plated or ebonized. They are all inspired by the visual language of his paintings, which will also be part of the show.
Pucci discovered Guggi’s work when Pucci staged a show at the Château La Coste in Provence, France. “When I walked by Guggi’s sculpture, it really hit me that there was something very special about it, because it’s so unexpected considering he went through a very aggressive period in this punk rock genre, yet his work is so Zen, and to tell you the truth, it’s so Pucci.”
Guggi’s 15-foot vessel, entitled “Calix Meus Inebrians,” at Château La Coste.
“I’m often asked about the madness and chaos of the Virgin Prunes, and the quietness of my painting, but when I was once talking to my dad, he said nobody is one thing. The Virgin Prunes was a great release for me, for coming to terms with my past,” said the artist.
Guggi said there was a period when he preferred working in oil paint once he started really understanding what you could do with it. “There’s no color known to mankind that you can’t mix with oil paint. There’s no shape you can’t make. But then there’s the immediacy of artist’s acrylic.”
He also has worked with pastels, painted on wood, on canvas, and on a lot of different types of paper with very different finishes. As for sculptures, he works in bronze and gives it a distinct patina. “I’m working in wood at the moment. I have a Japanese master wood cutter that cuts shapes to my design. I always keep the line as simple as is possible. It’s a pure minimalism that I love.”
For many years before embarking on sculpting, Guggi felt being surrounded by objects, “common objects that were used and not necessarily noticed. Because I’m an abstract painter, I would refer to these objects.” He said that painters can create sculptures “because it feels like the same thing — you’re seeing things three-dimensionally when you’re painting. A sculptor can’t necessarily paint.”
When he was in primary school, he remembers being asked what he wanted to do when he got older. “I would say an artist, and they would say, ‘No. You should get a job in the post office, or you should get a job as a bus conductor, or a fireman, because people like you didn’t get to do that. But I was always drawing. I was not interested in what was going on in the classroom, and when the teacher wrote something on the blackboard and wiped it off, I was looking at the marks that the duster left behind. I was just a visual person…When I was a tiny child, I had to have a pencil in my hand the whole time, because that’s what kept me happy. It was mainly very early coloring pencils.
“While I was in the band,” Guggi added, “I did wall drawings that would sometimes appear in photo shoots. I was always a painter. I was never a musician. I was more of a screamer.” He was the founding co-lead vocalist and visual architect for the band, bringing an aggressive theatrical energy to performances. “I brought the visual thing to the band.”
A Guggi abstract painting, entitled “Broken F,” in acrylic and graphite on brown paper.
David Monahan/ Courtesy of Guggi
