5 THE DRAWN BLANK SERIES
catalogue. “Here, he found motifs and scenes that would strike Northern Americans – and Northern Europeans – as ‘southern’. This is to say that they have an exotic quality that can seem challenging and tantalizing, partly because they are so different from everyday life at home and because they appeal to the imagination. They often invite you to continue the narrative, embellishing the scene played out in front of you.” A further artistic landmark for Dylan was his first New York show in autumn 2011 at the Gagosian Gallery, where The Asia Series was exhibited. These 18 works reflect on his time spent in China, Japan, Vietnam and Korea but also quote from art history, including works by Édouard Manet, Paul Gauguin and Henri Cartier- Bresson. In November 2012, the artist’s controversial Revisionist Art Series opened in New York with large silkscreen works that satirize lofty public figures and celebrities within the format of famous magazine covers, re- contextualizing the familiar graphics and iconography with vivacity and a maverick sense of the absurd. From February 2013 the Palazzo Reale, Milan, presented Dylan’s New Orleans Series, a group of 23 oil- on-canvas works paying homage to the birthplace of blues and jazz in atmospheric 1940s scenes and decadent, virtually monochrome nudes. “Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you,” says Dylan. “There’s something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands … The city is one very long poem.” Dylan’s first museum show in London, Face Value, opened at the National Portrait Gallery on 24 August 2013. An exhibition of 12 pastel portraits depicting enigmatic characters conflated from memory, imagination and real life with such names as Nina Felix and Red Flanagan, it represented a break in tradition for this august institution, which generally admits only portraiture of well-known figures in British public life. In November 2013, Dylan’s lifelong fascination with metalwork came into the public arena at Halcyon Gallery’s exhibition Mood Swings, presenting his first collection of iron sculptures. In the Foreword to the catalogue, Andrew Kelly describes these imposing and practical structures: “Tools of the labourer hang alongside cogs, chains, blades and saws that are suspended in the air like fossils preserved in a geological cross-section of landscape.” Works of threshold and transition, they bar the path but simultaneously allow everyone to see through to the scenery beyond. During 2014, Dylan exhibited again with Halcyon Gallery, showing Revisionist Art and Side Tracks, a running series of over 300 prints, each uniquely hand-embellished by the artist. Here he revisits the evocative Train Tracks image from The Drawn Blank Series, re-colouring, re-configuring and re-imagining it, revealing a flicker of his continuing journey, at once repetitive and ever-changing.
SELECTED REFERENCES ________________________________________
[i] Quoted from an interview with John Elderfield published in the catalogue to The Asia Series, 2011. [ii] Quoted in Bert Cartwright, ‘The Mysterious Norman Raeben’, http://www.geocities.com/athens/ forum/2667/raeben.htm. [iii] Marisha Pessl, ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’, New York Times, 1 June 2008.
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