Songs of the Open Road, currently on display at Halcyon Gallery‘s flagship at 148 New Bond Street, features works from seven influential artists. The exhibition delves into how visual art captures the essence of journeys, whether great or small.
The esteemed artist and poet Robert Montgomery is the newest member of the gallery’s program. The show traverses Bob Dylan’s tours across America, Montgomery’s drives along the M20, and Monet’s hikes along the Normandy coastline, offering diverse perspectives on the theme of travel. Each work reflects a journey, and the show takes its title from Walt Whitman’s ode to exploration, Song of the Open Road.
The show aims to elucidate the technological innovations of the 19th Century that enabled artists to travel far and wide, carrying portable equipment and working en plein air. This artistic tradition is a focus of the exhibition, which explores a contemporary response to the practice and the journeys resulting from the creative instinct to wander.
Robert Montgomery’s work takes centre stage, showcasing his signature light works, which have displayed his evocative poetry in public spaces and monumental landscapes worldwide. In addition to these sculptures, Montgomery will exhibit canvases that combine poetry and landscapes, reflecting his Romantic sensibility and admiration for the likes of J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich. His works are hung in dialogue with paintings by Bob Dylan, with both artists sharing an affinity for vast landscapes and a yearning to reconnect with nature.
Original paintings by Bob Dylan are displayed throughout the exhibition, including canvases from his critically acclaimed series The Beaten Path and watercolours from a new body of work entitled Route 66. Dylan is world-renowned for producing some of the most memorable songs ever. However, his visual artwork has just recently been noticed. He began drawing and painting in the 60s, but his works were rarely accessible to the public until his first exhibition in 2007. Since then, Dylan has been increasingly dedicated to his visual art, producing some of his most ambitious and accomplished work in recent years.
Contemporary British master David Hockney and Spanish painter Pedro Paricio explore and capture journeying in their work. Their methods are also shaped by the legacy of artists inspired by monumental landscapes. Paricio’s interpretation of Hockney’s paintings of Southern California inspired his Master Landscapers series and continues his dialogue with Britain’s most celebrated living artist. With Paricio’s characteristically colourful geometric designs, these paintings invite us to view the iconic landscapes of the Hollywood Hills and the Pacific Coast Highway afresh. Hockney’s vibrant and abstract Snails Space prints also feature, echoing his earlier panoramas of Mulholland Drive. For the first time, Paricio’s landscapes will hang alongside the Hockney works which inspired them: a meditation on the winding roads of California.
Reflecting on 150 years since the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris, Halcyon Gallery showcases the movement’s impact on contemporary artists: a series of canvases by Paricio, painted on his travels through the South of France, combine an Impressionist attention to the intricate play of light with the vibrant colours and textures that characterise his oeuvre. In conversation with these pieces is one of Hockney’s innovative iPad drawings. In parallel to the technological innovations that enabled the Impressionists to travel, the invention of the iPad has facilitated Hockney’s unique practice in recent years. These pieces showcase his observations of natural phenomena reproduced through the digital medium’s luminous and technicolour qualities. Claude Monet’s Le Val d’Antifer (1885), an extraordinary example of the Impressionists’ masterful ability to capture momentary conditions in a vivid and complex manner, also hangs amongst these contemporary masterpieces.
In celebration of the movement’s anniversary, digital artist Dominic Harris has created a new immersive installation: Blue Visions of an Iridescent Soul. Drawing inspiration from nature, the artist reveals the rippling blue scales of a butterfly’s wing, which are only visible at a microscopic level. This dynamic work explores the unseen wonders of our environment on an immersive scale. The visuals within the space shift with the viewer’s perspective, paralleling the phenomenon of luminescence in nature. Here, Harris translates the fleeting beauty of the natural world into the digital realm. Magnifying the intricate structure of a butterfly’s wing parallels the innovative brushstrokes of the Impressionist painters, who vividly captured the transient effects of light and movement.
The exhibition will also present a new work by Ernesto Cánovas, The Way to the Top, which brings together fragments of an otherworldly landscape, playing on the nostalgic imagery of a quintessential American road trip. Exploring the relationship between photography, history and collective memory, Cánovas works with various vintage sources, digitally manipulating images and transferring them onto wooden panels. The hazy, reworked quality of the photos appears as a blurry memory or an ethereal dreamscape.
Established in 1983, Halcyon Gallery specialises in modern and contemporary art, spanning Impressionism to Pop Art. It operates three London galleries on New Bond Street and Harrods, Knightsbridge.
The gallery showcases art from modern masters, critically acclaimed living artists, and promising new talent. It is committed to developing the careers of diverse artists with exceptional skills and capturing the imagination of collectors, international museums and institutions, and the general public. Halcyon Gallery employs a full-service creative team that offers expert professional support for artistic innovation.
The company is devoted to building distinguished art collections for its clients. It has a long track record of placing works of the highest quality in museums and prominent public spaces worldwide.
In 2023, Halcyon Gallery moved into 148 New Bond Street, one of London’s oldest and most historic gallery spaces. Built-in 1881 and formerly occupied by the Fine Art Society, this historic address has been subject to a comprehensive interior redesign, transforming it into an ultra-modern art space for the 21st Century.
Top Photo: Second Detail, Snails Pace and Fourth Detail, Snails Pace by David Hockney
Songs of the Open Road is open at Halcyon Gallery’s flagship at 148 New Bond Street until 1 September 2024