"Untitled (medium black)" is one of David Mach’s inventive works from his MatchHead series that incorporates multi-colored wooden matches to replicate skin tones and a traditional African head dress. Mach excels not only in human representations, but also in animals including rhinoceros, gorillas, stags, and rams. At one point in his career, Mach accidentally set one of his match sculptures alight, but has since decided to continue igniting some of them, as a form of performance art demonstrating how one destroys the very thing they worked laboriously on to create.

David Mach (B.1956, Methil, Fife) is a contemporary Scottish artist who primarily works in sculpture and installations. He is known for his innovative and unusual sculptures comprised of mass-produced found objects to create such works as match stick animal heads, coat hanger vases, domino tiled bodies, and maniacally deranged teddy bears with gas cans and torches. Though often humorous, his art at times works as a social commentary and political protest, as seen with his life-sized replica of the Polaris submarine in 1983; a reaction against the nuclear arms race growing between world powers.

Selected Museum Collections:
National Galleries of Scotland (Edinburgh, UK)
McMaster Museum of Art (Hamilton, Ontario)
National Portrait Gallery (London, UK)
Royal Academy of Art (London, UK)