Nancy Dwyer (b.1954) is a key member of the Pictures Generation among artists including Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, John Baldessari and Louise Lawler. The radical group sought to critique the image and brand saturated nature of mainstream media.
Dwyer’s work is most known for its subversive use of language itself to register pure emotion, shock and sometimes even hold violent and subversive tendencies.
In this unworn collaboration with Swatch from 1997 – who have also worked with makers such as Keith Haring, Vivienne Westwood and Damien Hirst – the hands (reading ‘DES’) travel around the face to spell out “desire, despair, destroy, destiny.”