ART CITIES: Rome-Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan is a worldwide cultural icon who has been inspiring audiences for six decades. Through music, words and art, Dylan remains 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.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MAXXI Archive

“Retrospectrum” features more than 100 of Bob Dylan’s artworks in an array of media, with important works loaned from private collections around the world. The artist’s diverse creations include oil, acrylic and watercolor painting, as well as his ink, pastel and charcoal drawings and distinctive ironwork sculptures. The exhibition itinerary is divided into eight sections that trace Dylan’s journey in the visual arts and, at the same time, bring us into contact with his creativity as a musician, poet and artist: Early Works, The Beaten Path, Mondo Scripto, Revisionist, The Drawn Blank, New Orleans, Deep Focus, Ironworks. Early Works includes a series of drawings made in the 1970s in which Dylan took note of the reality around him, of every image at hand, drawing full-page figures and objects. These illustrations anticipate the 2018 works of Mondo Scripto, whereby the artist returned to the dialogue between music and visual art by producing a series in which the handwritten lyrics of his most representative songs are accompanied by original drawings recalling the titles or key moments of the songs themselves. The Beaten Path is a portrait of the American landscape, a visual journey across the United States to the discovery of beauty, even in the forgotten places that form the backdrop to everyday life. The works show glimpses of motels and diners that are always open, abandoned amusement parks and vintage cars, and large buildings illuminated by streetlamps. In many cases, the road punctuates the scene with long highways that seem to unfold endlessly towards the horizon. Mondo Scripto features some of Dylan’s most famous lyrics, as personally transcribed by the artist and accompanied by his graphite drawings. These combinations of words and images testify to the existence of a deep and direct connection between his visual art and his written compositions.  The pencil drawings make visible the dialogue between image and text, between past and present, which has changed the relationship between music and words thanks to the continuous creative flow that fuels Dylan’s art. The Subterranean Homesick Blues Series is part of this series, which will enter the MAXXI Collection. Revisionist is a series in which Dylan reworks the graphic design, words and color content of famous magazine covers, from ‘Rolling Stone’ to ‘Playboy’, and transforms them into new large-scale screen-printed images. The Drawn Blank is a sort of illustrated diary depicting snapshots of life on the road – portraits, historical places, panoramas and hidden corners. The series originated from a collection of charcoal pencil and pen sketches made between ’89 and ’92 during tours in America, Europe and Asia. Over the years, Dylan has modified the drawings several times, adding detail, colour and depth.  New Orleans immortalises the bond between Dylan and New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz; the city is located at the southern end of Highway 61, one of America’s most famous roads (also known as ‘The Blues Highway’), which runs north-south through the central part of the United States and passes through the places of Dylan’s childhood. In every corner of New Orleans, the artist’s eye identifies infinite cues for his works; for Dylan, the gestures and habits of its citizens are a source of inspiration that translates into scenes of daily life where a close-up look succeeds in creating a certain level of intimacy between the subjects portrayed and the observer. Deep Focus features paintings with particular framings and image cuts, evocative and often mysterious compositions suspended between life and theatre and inspired by the documentary spirit of photography and cinema. The title of the series refers to a film technique in which the narrative is the result of the combination of foreground, background and backdrop, which are all in focus at the same time for details to be discerned at any depth. Ironworks. The exhibition itinerary closes with a series of iron sculptures – functional structures composed of objects and tools put to new use that recall Dylan’s childhood memories of the mining area of northern Minnesota, as well as the United States’ iconic industrial past.

Photo: Bob Dylan, Red Sunset, 2019, acrylic on canvas, © Bob Dylan, Courtesy the artist and MAXXI

Info: Curator: Shai Baite, MAXXI (Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo), Via Guido Reni 4a, Rome, Italy, Duration: 16/12/2022-30/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.maxxi.art/en/