October Gallery presents William S. Burroughs, a solo exhibition of rarely seen works which features paintings and drawings created from a variety of materials. From spray paint, ink and acrylic to markers and gunshots, Burroughs’ art is an expedition, identifying portals to unknown worlds and intelligences. His way of seeing is as a creative observer of states of mind. “The pictures constantly change because you are drawn into time travel on a network of associations.” For Burroughs, everything is alive, and his artwork explores this idea, as he did through words in his genre-bending writings. He belongs to no school of art; what he paints expands on the work he has developed throughout his career, in words, multimedia experiments and image-making.
Now one hundred and eleven years since William S. Burroughs’ birth, the exhibitionhighlights the personal intelligence of his work.
Burroughs was a prolific writer. He also practiced visual art throughout his life. For decades he produced photographs, collages and films. In multimedia collaborations with Brion Gysin, they pioneered incisive tools – ‘cut-ups’- to deconstruct mechanisms of institutionalized control systems that corrupt inborn intelligence. On the death of Gysin in 1986, he became a painter. In 1987, he began painting every day. October Gallery first mounted an exhibition of his art the year after, in 1988. Although his literature had been censored in Britain, he lived in London during the late 1960’s and early ‘70s, making strong connections with many noteworthy figures of the British art scene such as Francis Bacon. References to Burroughs’ works and creative practice are now deeply embedded in Western culture, from painting to film to advertising to literature to journalism to music. His 1952 novel, Queer, is the foundation of Luca Guadagnino’s current film of the same name, starring Daniel Craig.
| Duration | 06 March 2025 - 05 April 2025 |
| Times | Tuesday-Saturday 12.30-17.30 |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | October Gallery |
| Address | 24 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AL |
| Contact | 020 7242 7367 / art@octobergallery.co.uk / www.octobergallery.co.uk |