FEATURED
‘Last Pianist (II)’
We are delighted to have chosen this large four-panel painting from his artistic estate to go into CHRIS GOLLON: Beyond the Horizon, the forthcoming museum retrospective of Chris’s music-related works, opening in October. Subscribe to our mailing list to receive more information, or keep up to date via the Exhibitions and News blogs below.
EXHIBITIONS
We are delighted to be curating the forthcoming major museum retrospective of Chris Gollon’s music related works. The exhibition will also be the premiere of FIREWALL, a unique new work of film, art and music, which is a collaboration with the Sleaford Mods, combining their track Firewall (Eton Alive, 2019) with Chris Gollon’s imagery. Exhibition opens 12th October 2019, accompanied by a full-colour catalogue available from the Shop section of this website.
NEWS
We are delighted to have just published a brand new ISBN-numbered fine art catalogue on Chris Gollon’s Fourteen Stations of the Cross. It marks the tenth anniversary of their installation in the grade-one listed Church of St John on Bethnal, designed by Sir John Soane, next to the V&A Museum of Childhood in east London. It also marks the installation in the church’s South Gallery of three related works to the Stations, which have kindly been donated to the church by a private patron. One of these works is ‘Judas Iscariot & The Magdalene’, which we believe is the only painting in art history of Judas alone with the Magdalene. Chris Gollon did not paint himself in his Stations, but did controversially use his own son as the model for Jesus, his daughter as Mary, his wife as Veronica and Fr Alan Green as Nicodemus. However, in ‘Judas Iscariot & The Magdalene’ he has cast himself as Judas, penitent and hanging from a tree. It was partially inspired by Bob Dylan’s lyrics “I can’t think for you/You’ll have to decide/Whether Judas Iscariot/Had God on his side…” (from the song ‘With God on Our Side’ first released on the 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin’). The new catalogue feature texts by art critics Nicholas Usherwood, Laura Gascoigne, Jackie Wullschalager; art historian Tamsin Pickeral and novelist Sara Maitland. To purchase or learn more, click: Chris Gollon: Stations of the Cross.
BLOG
I’m delighted that the collector who owns ‘House of Sleep’ by Chris Gollon will be lending it to ‘CHRIS GOLLON: Beyond the Horizon’ the 3-month solo museum retrospective exhibition of his music-related works, which I am curating this autumn. In 1998, along with several other artists including Yoko Ono, Gavin Turk and David Bowie, British artist Chris Gollon was handed a 60-second tape by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, with the instruction to respond visually to the music. The result of this multi-media artistic collaboration for the ‘ROOT’ exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery, London, was the start of Gollon’s fascination with ‘boundary crossing’ (how one art form can influence another and lead it to new areas of thought and feeling). Thurston’s tape was a strange sort of clanging, that reminded Chris Gollon of a scene in the film Jeremiah Johnson, when Robert Redford makes the mistake of crossing into the Native American burial grounds, where charms hung from the trees and pyres, and only the mad, the dead or fools were allowed. The music and the memory it evoked helped Chris create ‘House of Sleep’, a painting which sold immediately into a private collection. The painting is also featured and discussed by art historian Tamsin Pickeral in her 2010 biography of Chris Gollon Humanity in Art. In his recent book Thurston Moore: We Sing A New Language, Nick Soulsby interviews Chris Gollon about the collaboration with Moore for ‘ROOT’, and how it started for Chris Gollon a 20-year journey into artistic ‘boundary crossing’ and working with other musicians. I’m delighted Nick Soulsby, also now a Gollon collector, will be contributing to the museum catalogue for CHRIS GOLLON: Beyond the Horizon….
David Tregunna, Director, IAP Fine Art (August 2019)
