The World Premiere of a new documentary ‘CHRIS GOLLON: Life in Paint’ (85 mins) is at the Barbican Centre on 29 October. Tickets and the trailer can be accessed here. Part of the Doc ‘N Roll Festival, it features Thurston Moore, Maggi Hambling, Eleanor McEvoy, Yi Yao, leading art historians and writers, BBC archive footage, and found footage of Chris Gollon (1953 -2017) painting in his studio.
Online at IAP Fine Art, a mini-survey exhibition of Gollon’s work follows the chronology of the documentary, showing works in private or museum collections or from the Chris Gollon Estate. Selected works show how he used music in three different ways to create imagery related to people and keep painting alive in the late 1990s to 2000s when people were saying it was dead. Also included are selected religious works, such as Gollon’s highly-acclaimed Fourteen Stations of the Cross, recently featured on BBC1’s Gareth Malone’s Easter Passion.
Not being a churchgoer, for these significant site-specific works, Gollon made the unusual decision to use his son as the model for Jesus, increasing the emotional intensity. Although, as Gollon admits in the documentary, it was a decision he came to regret since he had to paint his son dead. In his first great series on the theme ‘On The Road to Narragonia’ (1995 – 1998), art historian Mary Rose Beaumont noted Gollon’s “fine sense of the ridiculous”, placing him in the Northern European tradition of painters such as Breughel and Bosch, depicting our human capacity for folly.
A defining moment came in 1998: Thurston Moore sent Chris Gollon, Yoko Ono, David Bowie, Gavin Turk and others a different 52-second tape, challenging them to make a work of art in response. This led to ‘ROOT’, a crossover music and art exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery, London. It became the fillip to Gollon’s 19-year fascination with artistic boundary crossing, collaborations with Grammy-nominated classical virtuoso and composer Yi Yao, and Irish singer-songwriter Eleanor McEvoy. The exhibition highlights work from these fruitful two-way collaborations.
In 2005, Gollon’s ‘Einstein & The Jealous Monk (after Bob Dylan)’ was purchased by the Huddersfield Art Gallery, where it was hung in the permanent collection alongside Francis Bacon’s ‘Figure Study (II)’. Works included from 2009, when Gollon became the first non-academic to be made a Fellow and First Artist in Residence at the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, show how successfully he worked with some of the world’s leading thinkers on the Being Human project. Selected works show how Gollon innovated acrylic painting by importing Old Master techniques of thin washes and glazes, combined with printmaker’s rollers and other techniques Gollon discovered making monotypes. With a surge of interest in Gollon’s work since his untimely death in 2017, the exhibition and documentary give insights into an exceptionally imaginative artist’s mind and working methods.
Top Image Chris Gollon Einstein & The Jealous Monk (Detail)