THE SILKSCREEN COLLECTION
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at Copenhagen’s Statens Museum for Kunst from September 2010 to April 2011, visitors saw how Dylan had developed preliminary studies into richly coloured depictions of countryside, cityscape and, above all, characters such as musicians, card players and troublemakers. A further artistic landmark was Dylan’s 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 satirised 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. In February 2013 the Palazzo Reale in Milan exhibited 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 portrayals of decadent, virtually monochrome nudes. ‘Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you’, says Dylan in Chronicles . ‘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 in 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. Three months later, Dylan’s fascination with metalwork came into the public arena at Halcyon Gallery’s exhibition Mood Swings , presenting his first collection of iron sculptures. Works of threshold and transition, they bar the path but simultaneously allow people 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, revisiting the evocative Train Tracks image from The Drawn Blank Series . The Face Value exhibition toured, first to Copenhagen’s Museum of National History in 2014, then to the Butler Museum in Youngstown, Ohio, in 2015, followed by Kent State University Museum, Ohio, and Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz in 2016. The New Orleans Series travelled to the city that originally inspired this suite of paintings for a two-part show. In October 2016 an official announcement by Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, revealed that Dylan was to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’. The following month, Dylan’s major exhibition The Beaten Path opened at Halcyon Gallery. In these new drawings, watercolours and acrylic works on canvas the artist depicts many facets of the American heartlands. According to Jonathan Jones, art critic at the Guardian , ‘A real artist made these drawings and paintings. Their integrity is compelling. They demand to be looked at, for their awe and wonder at the beauty and grandeur of being alive. These are the pictures of a true poet.’
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