A WORLD-EXCLUSIVE EXHIBITION INCLUDING NEW PAINTINGS BY BOB DYLAN AT THE HALCYON GALLERY, LONDON

LONDON (May 24, 2021) – To celebrate Bob Dylan turning 80 today, Halcyon Gallery has dedicated its New Bond Street galleries to celebrate the artistic career of this great icon showcasing two exhibitions of his work including newly created paintings, exhibited for the very first time; Bob Dylan: 60 Years of Creating on view at 144-146 New Bond Street & Bob Dylan: Editions on view at 29 New Bond Street.

Bob Dylan is a worldwide cultural icon who has been inspiring audiences for six decades. For the past 60 years, through music, words and visual art, Dylan has remained restlessly creative, continually reinventing himself and challenging his audience in new ways. His expansive body of visual art includes works on paper, paintings, sculpture and large-scale installations, across several major series of work since 2007.

To mark Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday, Halcyon Gallery presents Bob Dylan: 60 Years of Creating, a showcase exploring the artist’s unmatched achievements across creative mediums, from his first studio album release in 1962 to the recent announcement of his forthcoming museum retrospective at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Art, Miami, FL, USA, in November 2021. Bob Dylan: 60 Years of Creating features figurative paintings from 2020–21, in which Dylan approaches the American landscape with a renewed and profound consideration of its people, alongside important artworks from the artist’s archive.

Bob Dylan: 60 Years of Creating features both new, figurative works, painted in 2020-21 in which he continues to explore his own American landscape but with a renewed and profound consideration of its people, as well as historic, archival pieces from his career. Works on view include a never-before-seen Subway Cityscape Triptych (2020), at over 1.8 meters high by 2.7 meters wide, this is Dylan’s monumental tribute to New York, the city that shaped him as he embarked on his career as a musician in the early 1960s. Alongside these original oils are silkscreen prints, ironwork sculptures and lyrics & drawings from the Mondo Scripto series, the songwriter’s own selection of his most renowned lyrics, each handwritten by Dylan in pen on paper and accompanied by a pencil drawing.

President & Founder of the Halcyon Gallery, Paul Green, who has worked closely with Bob Dylan for over 15 years, says:

‘Halcyon Gallery congratulates Bob Dylan on his achievements as a visual artist over the past six decades. We have had the privilege of representing Dylan's visual art for the past 15 years and we invite you to come to celebrate the artistic endeavours of this creative icon at our Bond Street Galleries and online where we explore the breadth of Dylan’s creativity and his monumental impact on the world as a visual artist.’ — Paul Green, President and Founder, Halcyon Gallery

PAINTINGS
Bob Dylan has produced five major series of paintings since his first gallery exhibition in 2007. The first of these, The Drawn Blank Series, based on his drawings created whilst on tour in the late eighties, is characterised by bold colours, loose brushwork and his sometimes surreal use of perspective and subject matter. During an intensive burst of artistic activity, Dylan then went on to produce The Brazil Series (2010), The Asia Series (2011) and The New Orleans Series (2013), each of which are drawn from life, memory, archival film and photography and reflect a wide range of influences from European modernism and contemporary art.

LYRICS & DRAWINGS
Mondo Scripto features some of Dylan's most renowned lyrics, handwritten in pen on paper and each accompanied by a corresponding graphite drawing. They demonstrate a direct engagement between his visual art and his songwriting. Dylan's lyrics can be oblique or straightforward, elevated or conversational. He is a master of the songwriter's craft. Dylan returns to songs again and again - tweaking and reworking them. In live performance, he often presents a new version of a well-known song. For Mondo Scripto, some songs have had a few lines changed, while others have had verses completely rewritten. The pencil drawings continue this dialogue between past and present, fixed and fluid, conducted by an artist who changed the relationship between music and words forever.

SCULPTURE
Growing up in an area known as the 'Iron Range', Dylan was surrounded by industry during his childhood. Reclaimed by the artist, the tools of the past now adorn gates, screens, furniture and wall hangings. With their repurposed parts given a new function, the Ironworks retain both the rawness and the history of their origins. The gates are carefully crafted, and contain symbols, jokes and allusions.