Press

1 Entries: Showing 1 - 1 Order by: Title ↑ Title ↓ Date ↑ Date ↓

Press Reviews

Diptych Study for Henley Royal Regatta

The excellent pre-Regatta review of Chris Gollon's exhibition by Simon Barnes, multi-award-winning chief sportswriter at The Times, appeared in The Times on June 30th and was entitled ' Rowers shattered by pain of defeat '

Gollon At Henley (Version II)

Chris Gollon's solo show at the River & Rowing Museum, Henley on Thames, and the unveiling of the museum-commissioned painting 'Gollon At Henley' was reported by Linda Serck for BBC Berkshire, having interviewed Chris Gollon at the exhibition.

Financial Times/March 2008

As her 'Critic's Choice' FT's Chief Art Critic Jackie Wullschlager reviews Chris Gollon's Stations of the Cross unveiled on Good Friday 2008. To read article, click: The Financial Times .

Chris Gollon's Stations of the Cross unveiled on Good Friday 2008, reviewed by Maev Kennedy in The Guardian on March 21st 2008 .

Chris Gollon and Fr Alan Green were interviewed by Edward Stourton on the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 about Chris Gollon's Stations of the Cross and the unveiling of all fourteen paintings on Good Friday 2008.

Saturday 22nd March 2008: brief article in the American newspaper USA Today Easter 2008 .

Richard Crowe reviews Chris Gollon's exhibition at IAP Fine Art, London, for New York's Whitehot Magazine. To read the article, click: Whitehot Magazine Feb 2008

"Chris Gollon....has produced some truly compelling work" The Independent

"Chris Gollon provides the perfect enticement to visit the Church of St John on Bethnal Green.." Rachel-Campbell-Johnston, The Times

Chris Gollon at IAP Fine Art, London

In the information age, we expect instant answers to everything: speed on the draw with the 30-second sound-bite is the ticket to professional success. But while this is an asset in a politician, it is a drawback in an artist. An artist who can explain his work too quickly had no cause to make it.

Chris Gollon has no ready answers to questions about his latest exhibition, although it prompts plenty, beginning with the reason for the title of its centrepiece, Einstein and the Jealous Monk. Bob Dylan fans will recognise a quote from Desolation Row, used by Gollon as a random imaginative trigger in the same way actors use free-association in improvisation. Song lyrics, news photos, events in his own life and, increasingly – since a commission for a series of Stations of the Cross – the classic stories of Christian iconography, all provide starting points for Gollon’s new pictures. His influences are as eclectic as his sources. Stylistic references to El Greco, Ribera, Goya and Beckmann mix on equal terms with a range of pictorial devices from early Renaissance gold grounds to contemporary speech bubbles or animation backdrops: the distant mountain ranges linking his new pictures owe more to Looney Tunes than Mantegna. A voracious consumer of visual ideas, he helps himself to whatever will make his pictures work.

Since making his name as a painter of the absurd, Gollon has shifted into tragicomic territory: in his religious works buffoons still appear, but in supporting roles. While he likes to do the odd ‘cover version’ of a famous painting – such as his mocking self-portrait in the pose of Beckmann’s The King – he is guided less by artistic precedent than gut instinct, which explains how – in an age of post-modern painterly angst – he can go on producing such gutsy paintings. ‘All art is theft,’ said Picasso. Gollon is a pro who steals to order, and resets his gems in an idiom that is completely contemporary, and completely his own.

Laura Gascoigne

(Laura Gascoigne, visual arts critic, writes for The Spectator, RA magazine, Galleries magazine, The Tablet and ART Review….this article published in Galleries magazine)

created on 2007-02-02 by iapgoll.