ART CITIES:Seoul-Billy Childish
Billy Childish is a British artist, writer, and musician. He is known for his Expressionist paintings which resemble the work of both Edvard Munch and Peter Doig. Childish co-founded the Stuckism art movement along with Charles Thomson in 1999, which promoted the use of Modernist pictorial ideals and personal expression over Postmodernist cynicism. Although Childish avoided the pitfalls of conceptualism, his return to figuration and expressive painting is reminiscent of artists who criticize the insulated art world through irony and satire, including Mike Kelley and Douglas Gordon.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive
Billy Childish for his solo exhibition “wolves, sunsets and the self” has created a body of work emblematic of his “radical traditionalist” approach. Pulling from themes found throughout art history (a verdant landscape, a sunset, a still life) Childish presents intensely personal vignettes that feel archetypical, vibrating with the kinetic energy of a moment lived. While working in a state of flow is essential to the creative process of any artist, for Childish this state represents the entirety of artistic production. Working intuitively and quickly, his highly kinetic paintings are mostly created in a single session without any revision. His style is often compared to the expressionist painters of the late 19th/early 20th but for Childish it is the embodiment of these artists’ spiritual and creative integrity, and how this informed their roles within society, that is most compelling. An unabashed universalist, Childish considers artistry to be the inheritance of every human being, a method to capture the expressive impulse and visualize the powerful lure of beauty. Utterly non-ironic and vividly familiar, a Childish painting can be interpreted the way one might interpret a dream. In these paintings, Childish presents a series of landscapes ranging from an idyllic sunset to an ominously clouded sky. Also included is a still life of a vase of flowers and a wolf stalking its prey. All of these can be thought of as signifiers for states of being or emotions legible in the form of a landscape. Billy Childish is known for his introspective, autobiographical, and deeply emotional paintings, writing, and music. After leaving secondary school at age 16, Childish worked at the Naval Dockyard in Chatham as an apprentice stonemason. Initially denied an interview to the local art school, he produced hundreds of drawings that gained him entry to London’s Saint Martin’s School of Art. Childish’s defiance of authority led to his eventual expulsion in 1981. Since then, Childish has gained something of a cult status worldwide, writing and publishing novels and confessional poetry, recording LPs, and painting. Through all of these disciplines, Billy Childish addresses social, political, and personal issues such as war, protest, his turbulent childhood, and his struggles with addiction. While his confessional poetry and music explore these issues with startling honesty, Childish’s paintings are more subtle.
Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 74-18, Yulgok-ro 3-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Duration: 23/4-30/5/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:-00, www.lehmannmaupin.com
