Press Corner
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If you are a member of the press and you need print-quality images of Chris Gollon or his work, or would like to receive press releases/information about the artist's forthcoming exhibitions or events, please contact FMCM Associates giving the name of your publication, copy deadline, and telephone number on +44 0207 405 7422 or email Annabel Robinson: annabelr@fmcm.co.uk
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New book on Chris Gollon
'Chris Gollon: Humanity in Art' by Tamsin Pickeral
Leading art historian Tamsin Pickeral is now writing a book solely on Chris Gollon's life and work, which will be published in spring 2010. Her previous books have been very well received in the press. Her last publication, published by Merrell (London & New York), was very well received and reviewed by the arts press including very favourably by Frank Whitford in the Sunday Times, and was voted in the top 50 books of 2008 by the Financial Times. 'Chris Gollon: Humanity in Art' will be published in April 2010, but may be pre-ordered from Amazon now. To pre-order, click here.
Selected Press Reviews
Alan Yentob's 'Imagine' programme on BBC1--1st Dec '09
Justice (II)
Chris Gollon is one of 5 artists featured in BBC1's Imagine programme, which was shown on 1st Dec 2009. As part of a documentary about the Arts Council's 'Own Art' scheme, the BBC1 film crew followed Gollon as he accepted, researched and then painted a private commission from a leading human rights lawyer to paint 'Justice'. Gollon produced two paintings on the theme, each very different in mood and impact.
Since he was only expecting one painting, the barrister faced an agonizing choice between two very powerful works. Click on the image to find out more.
BBC1 London News: Artist unveils seasonal pieces
Stations of the Cross (I): Jesus is Condemned to Death (Final Version)
Brenda Emmanus, Art & Culture correspondent for BBC1 news came to St John on Bethnal Green to interview Chris Gollon and Fr Alan Green about the permanent installation of Chris's Stations of the Cross in this beautiful grade-one listed church designed by Sir John Soane. BBC1 News on April 9th 2009. To view, click: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7992399.stm
"The figures in these paintings have a vivid almost hyper-real presence with expressions that often appear exaggerated. Gollon is quick to note:" I use narrative, but not in a boring illustrative way. In other words, a combination of the abstract and the figurative."... This familiarity but simultaneous distance is the ingredient that makes Gollon's work eternal."
Article by Rebecca Hopikinson, Aesthetica Magazine (Apr/May issue 2009). Aesthetica available in WH Smith, Borders and all good newsagents.
Beast
This quote comes from a long interview piece with Chris Gollon entitled 'Being Human' in the May 2009 (issue 273) of Artists & Illustrators Magazine, which is available in WH Smith, Borders and all good newsagents.
Chris talks about the interaction between the Fellows and him during his Fellowship and Residency at the Institute of Advanced Study Jan - Mar 2009
"An artist often relies on words to make his imagery (lines from a poem, a song, and so on). Then, once the image is made, it often induces people to put this image back into a different set of words. This creative process can lead us somewhere we would not have thought of going. A new image can then be made from this new set of words. This was the method I intended to use during my residency, and the discussions in my studio made this possible. I wasn't expecting my colleagues to learn anything from me; I was expecting to steal from them. As it turned out, we all benefited from this interaction (....)
In a seminar, I had shown the film I made with JABOD in 2008 called Kaleidomorphism One. It showed 500 of my paintings synchronized with music. One of the images was a martyrdom of St Cucufat, which I painted in 2004. Cucufat was roughly and publicly decapitated by the Romans in Barcelona in the 4th century. One of the Fellows, Professor Eduardo Mendietta, (Associate Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, USA) looking at this image took a great interest in its presentation of a hooded man delighting in another's pain, stubbing cigarettes out on his skin and behaving like a beast. Eduardo has recently written on Abu Ghraib, mass incarceration in the United States, and torture as a weapon of the state. I was interested in Eduardo's thoughts about what makes a 'beast' either in reality or philosophically, and I began a painting simply called 'The Beast'.
It was still in progress when another Fellow, Professor Abye Tasse, (a leading social work educator and Assistant Vice-President for International Affairs, Addis Ababa University) came into my studio. The painting had struck him very much and he told me about his work with child soldiers in Ethiopia. One 12-year old boy told of the first time he killed a man, when he was asked to walk across a scene of battle and shoot dead all the opposing wounded. Abye asked him what it felt like after killing the first one. The reply was very unexpected, even with Abye's experience, since the boy replied: "I felt a great sense of relief, like a great burden was lifted from my spirit". This reply will always stay with me, and took the picture in yet another new direction." Chris Gollon
A Passion for our Age by Sara Maitland in The Tablet
"They are harsh and demanding - but people are excited to have them. They are high-energy paintings - much larger than is usual and very bright, luminous in the cool classical space of Sir John Soane's church. They are fairly brutal too, medieval in mood though not in technique or style. They do not let you off.
I have been so moved by the way Gollon has interpreted the old stories both as a challenge to our current sensibility, which wants to be protected from too much darkness by "quick fix" solutions, and which has lost the ability to create deep images and stories.
But there was another aspect to all this. I felt myself profoundly challenged as a writer by Gollon's ability to hold together a long tradition and simultaneously represent it in a completely contemporary way. Since the late 1980s I have been trying, in various ways, to write stories that are both genuinely works of literature and equally works of theology. Encountering Gollon's Stations, I knew that he had gone further than I had. I wanted to get inside this power as a writer as well as a Christian." Sara Maitland
Stations of the Cross XIV: Jesus Is Laid In The Sepulchre
On the BBC Radio 4 programme: 'SUNDAY' on 22nd March 2009, Chris Gollon and Fr Alan Green were interviewed about Gollon's 14 Stations of the Cross for the grade-one listed Church of St John on Bethnal Green, London. To listen again, click: SUNDAY and the interview is approx 12.5 mins into the programme.
'The Expulsion of Eve'
Prior to his exhibition with IAP Fine Art at the Newcastle & Gateshead Art Fair, Chris Gollon was interviewed by editor David Whetstone: to see the article, click: The Journal August 2008.
Simon Barnes - The Times 2008
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 .
Press Review The Guardian March 2008
Chris Gollon's Stations of the Cross unveiled on Good Friday 2008, reviewed by Maev Kennedy in The Guardian on March 21st 2008 .
Press Review Today Programme Good Friday 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.
Press Review USA Today March 2008
Saturday 22nd March 2008: brief article in the American newspaper USA Today Easter 2008 .
Richard Crowe for New York's 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)
