honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by Barack Obama.
Bob Dylan (b. 1941) has drawn and painted whilst on tour for many years, drawing inspiration from the people and places he has encountered on the road. Dylan is a keen observer of life, finding richness in the everyday as he sees it, and depicting the world without great embellishment or exaggeration. Stylistically, his art is driven by a constant desire for innovation and discovery, calling upon a range of influences from European modernism to American documentary photography. Dylan’s ability to draw from array of sources, and yet remain remarkably authentic, is a hallmark of his visual art and music alike. As American author Bill Flanagan writes, ‘Dylan remains restlessly creative, going down the road with his eyes wide open’. The Asia Series , a visual reflection on Bob Dylan’s travels in Japan, China, Vietnam, and Korea, comprises people, interiors, architecture and landscapes. The series draws upon a variety of source material, from observational sketches to archival film and photography. Presenting his audience with suggestive, open-ended scenes, Dylan leaves the viewer to continue their own narrative beyond the confines of the artwork. Executed in muted, evocative colours, Dylan’s painting follows the order of natural reality; in the artist’s words, ‘the idea is to keep everything where it should be’. The 2021 release of The Asia Series is timely, coinciding with the tour of Dylan’s first major museum retrospective across Asia. Retrospectrum spans five decades of Dylan’s artistic career and features more than 250 paintings and drawings, including the original acrylics on canvas from The Asia Series , created in 2009–2010. The exhibition
through the back streets, alleys and country roads. Reminiscing about a landscape unpolluted by the ephemera of pop culture, fleeting snapshots of America emerge from the works. Mondo Scripto first opened at Halcyon Gallery in October 2018. The exhibition presented a selection of Bob Dylan’s most iconic songs, handwritten in pen on paper and accompanied by a corresponding drawing in graphite. As Tom Piazza, a celebrated novelist and writer on American music, wrote in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, “Dylan’s restlessly creative mind is never wholly satisfied, and those familiar with these songs will find surprise at many a new turn of phrase. The unexpected couplings of these works and images offer a surprisingly intimate door into each song, adding dimension, delight and insight into the artist’s relation to his own work”. In 2019 a landmark retrospective exhibition, Retrospectrum , featuring Dylan’s artistic output to date opened at MAM Shanghai, before beginning a tour that will cover Asia, Europe and the USA. The exhibition, which later opened in Beijing at Today Art Museum in July 2020 and in Shenzhen at the Jupiter Art Museum in December 2020, re-examines The Drawn Blank Series , The New Orleans Series , The Asia Series , Mood Swings , The Beaten Path and works from Mondo Scripto .
unites seven series of Dylan’s visual art, along with archival material and brand-new paintings. Retrospectrum explores the sheer breadth of Dylan’s achievement and his monumental impact on the world as a musician, poet and artist. Following its opening at Modern Art Museum, Shanghai, in September 2019, the exhibition attracted over 100,000 visitors in the opening three months, making it the most visited art exhibition in Shanghai that year. Retrospectrum then travelled to the Today Art Museum in Beijing before recently opening at the Jupiter Museum of Art in Shenzhen, where it will remain until March 2021. The ongoing success of Retrospectrum is testament to Dylan’s worldwide acclaim.
In February 2013 an exhibition of 23 new works on canvas, The New Orleans Series , opened at the Palazzo Reale in Milan. In August 2013, Bob Dylan: Face Value opened at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The exhibition later toured to Copenhagen’s Museum of National History in 2014, the Butler Museum in Youngstown, Ohio in 2015, to Kent State University Museum, Ohio, and Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz in 2016. Mood Swings , a major exhibition of new work by Dylan, opened at Halcyon Gallery in November 2013. Heralding the first public showing of the artist’s iron works – seven gates created from vintage iron and other metal parts – the sculptures reveal the artist’s lifelong fascination with welding and metalwork. The exhibition also included Side Tracks, a series of over 300 uniquely hand-embellished prints signed by the artist, in which he revisits the evocative image Train Tracks from The Drawn Blank Series. In October 2016 Dylan became the first singer-songwriter to be awarded the Nobel Prize for 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. The exhibition featured a collection of drawings, watercolours and acrylic works on canvas, depicting the artist’s view of American landscapes and urban scenes. The Beaten Path invites the viewer to accompany Dylan on his travels as he criss-crosses the United States
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker