Daneyal Mahmood Gallery is very pleased to present Oil Evolution by Andrei Molodkin – commemorating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. While Molodkin’s work is known for questioning the role of oil in Western democracies; and exploring the troubling intersection between art and money – Oil Evolution reconstructs the descent of man using a liquified record of the earth’s fossil history. Charles Darwin’s model of human evolution is reconstructed as a three-part installation of Primate, Australopithecine and Homo Sapien skulls negatively cast in acrylic and joined by a series of interconnected tubes circulating crude oil. Here it is not blood or DNA that is the great signifier, that which transmits the virtues of one generation to the next, but oil – the new symbol of a universalized identity.

“Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future. We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system – with all these exalted powers – Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” (Charles Darwin)