Billy Childish @ Lehmann Maupin, Seoul - wolves, sunsets and the self

Billy Childish: wolves, sunsets and the self
Lehmann Maupin, Seoul
April 23 – May 30, 2020

Lehmann Maupin presents an exhibition of new paintings by Billy Childish. The prolific British painter, musician, and writer has produced hundreds of albums of music and dozens of volumes of fiction and poetry. For his sixth exhibition with the gallery, and his first with Lehmann Maupin in Korea, Billy Childish has created a body of work emblematic of his “radical traditionalist” approach. Pulling from themes found throughout art history—a verdant landscape, a sunset, a still life—Billy Childish presents intensely personal vignettes that feel archetypical, vibrating with the kinetic energy of a moment lived.

While working in a state of flow is essential to the creative process of any artist, for Billy Childish this state represents the entirety of artistic production. Working intuitively and quickly, his highly kinetic paintings are mostly created in a single session without any revision. His style is often compared to the expressionist painters of the late 19th/early 20th century, such as Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch, but for Billy Childish it is the embodiment of these artists’ spiritual and creative integrity, and how this informed their roles within society, that is most compelling. An unabashed universalist, Billy Childish considers artistry to be the inheritance of every human being, a method to capture the expressive impulse and visualize the powerful lure of beauty.

Utterly non-ironic and vividly familiar, a Billy Childish painting can be interpreted the way one might interpret a dream. In these paintings, Billy Childish presents a series of landscapes ranging from an idyllic sunset to an ominously clouded sky. Also included is a still life of a vase of flowers and a wolf stalking its prey. All of these can be thought of as signifiers for states of being or emotions legible in the form of a landscape. For the artist, the conceptual should never replace the humanistic—Billy Childish states “I make a picture in the same way a child does—something ‘out there’ interests me. Making a painting of that ‘something’ then joins me with the universal creator/creation in a more intent way than just being an observer.”

BILLY CHILDISH (b. 1959, Chatham, Kent, United Kingdom; lives and works in Rochester/Chatham, Kent) attended Medway College of Design, Kent in 1977 and Saint Martin’s School of Art, London in 1978. Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized at Rochester Art Gallery, Kent, United Kingdom (2016); Opelvillen Rüsselsheim, Frankfurt, Germany (2016); White Columns, New York, NY (2010); and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, United Kingdom (2010). Select group exhibitions featuring his work include BILLY CHILDISH, HARRY ADAMS and EDGEWORTH JOHNSTONE: Our Friend Larionov, Pushkin House, London, United Kingdom (2014); Paintings Sweet Paintings, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany (2014); and British Art Show 5, City Art Centre, Edinburgh, Scotland (2000). Billy Childish has written and published five novels and more than 40 volumes of poetry, and recorded more than 150 LPs.

LEHMANN MAUPIN
74-18, Yulgok-ro 3-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul
lehmannmaupin.com

__________________________________

Billy Childish @ Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, Kent - man in the mouth of a cave

Billy Childish: man in the mouth of a cave
Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, Kent
26 May - 25 August, 2019 

Carl Freedman Gallery opens in Margate, Kent on Saturday 25th May with a major solo show of new work by British painter Billy Childish.

After purchasing part of the old Thanet Press building in the centre of town, Carl Freedman’s new HQ spans 10,000 square foot of a concrete 1960s commercial building. The site includes three exhibition spaces, an artist apartment and an upper floor dedicated to Freedman’s print publishing business Counter Editions. ‘This is a fantastic opportunity for us to present larger-scale solo presentations by our artists as well as more expansive curated shows. Margate is going through an amazing transformation, led by a growing art community, and we are excited to be a part of the future of the town’s creative-led regeneration’ – Carl Freedman.

The inaugural exhibition man in the mouth of a cave by Billy Childish introduces new themes in the artist’s oeuvre of swimming and wild uninhibited nature. Free of irony or superficial novelty, these paintings espouse values of authenticity, spirituality, and beauty, conveying a sense of a vivid physical presence. Above all, they express Childish’s earnest engagement with life. Waterfalls, the sea, caves, trees, nudes and the artist himself are recurring motifs. In some works the mouths of caves suggest the religious motif of the empty tomb, in others a dark, Styx-like river.

Present throughout is a quality of quiet melancholy combined with a vibrating, somewhat hallucinatory energy, rendered through Billy Childish’s roiling brushwork. Childish’s canvases clearly bear the marks of the art-historical lineage of which Childish feels himself a part. Interlocking patterns and forms cluster, coalesce, and dissipate, working as vehicles for Childish’s Munch-like preoccupation with colour. Staccato brushstrokes are contained by more flowing, sinuous lines, recalling the visionary intensity of German Expressionism.

Embedded in a tradition stretching back into the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Billy Childish’s work is still – as ever – insistently and idiosyncratically his own. As Billy Childish states: ‘You could say that these paintings are ultrapostmodernist; they’ve absorbed everything, and then decided what’s of value. Each one is an exultation of being a painting.’ Unconcerned with any narrative of progress within his practice each painting – whether a depiction of his nude body or a birch tree – is, for Billy Childish, a form of self-portraiture. In his own words: ‘As I work fluidly from painting to painting, theme to theme, so the cycles develop organically and explain themselves without my prescription. In essence I am painting one painting that is everchanging as if of its own volition – the painting of myself.’

In association with Damaged Good Records, Carl Freedman Gallery presents Wild Billy Childish & CTMF live in concert at Margate’s Theatre Royal on Sunday 16th June 2019, from 7pm. Tickets are on sale now via the Theatre Royal box office and website (click here: http://theatreroyalmargate.com).

Billy Childish is a prolific painter, author, poet, publisher, and musician. Born in 1959 in Chatham, Kent. He has extensively exhibited and performed internationally. Exhibitions include: heaven’s journey, Neugerriemschneider, Berlin (2018); man with jackdaw, Villa Schöningen, Berlin (2017); mountain view house, Goss Michael Foundation, Dallas (2017); Billy Childish: incomprehensible but certainly, Opelvillen, Rüsselsheim, Germany (2016); Billy Childish in Print (A Survey), Rochester Art Gallery, Kent (2016); the house at grass valley, Carl Freedman Gallery, London (2016); flowers, nudes and birch trees, Lehmann Maupin, New York (2015); Billy Childish. Frozen estuary and Other Paintings of the Divine Ordinary, The Historic Dockyard, Chatham, Kent; Billy Childish: Unknowable but Certain, ICA, London (2010). The artist lives and works in Kent, England.

CARL FREEDMAN GALLERY
28 Union Crescent, Margate, Kent, CT9 1NS, England
carlfreedman.com