Billy Childish
dal 16/9/2013 al 25/10/2013
Segnalato da
16/9/2013
Billy Childish
Carl Freedman Gallery, London
Darkness was here yesterday. While he is known for a prodigious range of activities - garage punk musician, poet, writer and publisher - this exhibition aims to enhance the viewers' appreciation of his paintings.
The Carl Freedman Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition by Billy Childish, his first in
a commercial gallery in the UK.
While Childish is known for a prodigious range of activities – garage punk musician, poet,
writer and publisher – this exhibition aims to enhance the viewers’ appreciation of his
paintings. For the last few years Childish has devoted most of his time to being in his studio,
and the resulting paintings have developed in scale and range of expressive qualities. Their
intense visionary style and commanding presence make them unusually powerful paintings,
and are quite a departure from his earlier small, Kirchner-like works often made on small
found wooden panels.
Much of Childish’s strongly autobiographical work places the artist at its centre. In some of
his more recent paintings the figure of the artist has been deferred in favour of archetypes,
whether known historical figures such as Edward Elgar and Charles Bukowski or nameless
oyster boat sailors and dock workers who once populated the river Medway and Chatham
dockyards, where Childish grew up and now has a studio.
While the motifs of the river and boatmen are universal themes, many of Childish's paintings
are connected to the locales of the Thames and Medway estuaries. The estuary has a
particular resonance as a place where water (time) flows in both directions, and where eddying
currents are met with stillness and relative tranquility. The icebergs of glacier bay (1907)
(2013) have a certain stillness too, as do the water reflections, the bare canvas and the poses of
the figures in other paintings, creating moments of calm which play off directly against the
hallucinatory palette, the dynamic compositions, and the immediacy of thought and action
expressed by liquid outlines and rapid brush strokes.
As a writer and poet it’s no surprise that Childish has a lot of literary influences, which have
been predominantly American and Russian. As Childish explains in a recent interview "I
don’t really get on with the English aesthetic. I describe myself as someone who refuses to be
English. I read a lot of Bukowski and John Fante, later Walt Whitman when I was 20 or so.
However as a young man I was quite a fan of Conrad. And he was a local man to Kent. And I
live with a little view of the river from the window. On the Medway we are a couple of miles
from the Thames where the book is narrated by Marlow, when they are at anchor off Tilbury.
It’s evening time. Marlow talks about where the lights of London are coming up and that
'darkness was here yesterday', comparing it to the Congo. Even if I’m painting a lonely boat
chugging along a Washington river, for some reason I always think of Heart of Darkness.
There was never a heart of darkness here, where I live, as far as I was concerned, if you look at
the history of the area. I just thought it was such a great title. I don’t think there’s a heart of
darkness any place on earth."
There will be a number of events during the exhibition, more details will be released. Recent
international solo exhibitions include neugerriemschneider, Berlin, Lehmann Maupin
Gallery, New York and China Art Objects, Los Angeles.
Image: clamming on maud (version x), 2013. Oil and charcoal on linen 183 x 305 cm
Private view is from 6-8pm on Tuesday 17th September.
Carl Freedman Gallery
29 Charlotte Road London EC2A 3PB
The exhibition will be open from Tuesday – Friday 11 – 6 pm and Saturday 12 – 6 pm, otherwise by appointment.