Huddersfield Art Gallery (12 Oct 2019 – 04 Jan 2020)
Princess Alexandra Walk, Huddersfield, W. Yorks HD1 2SU.
For the forthcoming major museum retrospective of his music-related works, IAP Fine Art is delighted to be borrowing back Chris Gollon’s painting ‘House of Sleep’ (48″ x 36″, 122 x 91cm, mixed media on panel 1998) from a private collection in Milan, (thanks to exhibition sponsors Williams & Hill). In 1998, along with several other artists including Yoko Ono, Gavin Turk and David Bowie, Chris Gollon was handed a 60-second tape by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, with the request to respond visually to the music. The result of this multi-media artistic collaboration for the ‘ROOT’ exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery, London, was the start of Gollon’s fascination with ‘boundary crossing’ (how one art form can influence another and lead it to new areas of thought and feeling). Thurston’s tape was a strange sort of clanging, that reminded Chris Gollon of a scene in the film Jeremiah Johnson, when Robert Redford makes the mistake of crossing into the Native American burial grounds, where charms hung from the trees and pyres, and only the mad, the dead or fools were allowed. The music and the memory it evoked helped Chris create ‘House of Sleep’, which sold immediately into a private collection. The painting is also featured and discussed by art historian Tamsin Pickeral in her 2010 biography of Chris Gollon Humanity in Art. In his recent book Thurston Moore: We Sing A New Language, Nick Soulsby interviews Chris Gollon about the collaboration with Moore for ‘ROOT’, and how it started for Chris Gollon a 20-year journey into artistic ‘boundary crossing’ and working with other musicians. Nick Soulsby, also now a Gollon collector, has contributed to the museum catalogue for CHRIS GOLLON: Beyond the Horizon, as has Thurston Moore, and also Graham Fellows (aka Jilted John).