Wellington Arch
21 June – 17 September 2023
Private View: Tuesday 20 June, 6 – 8.30pm
The accompanying catalogue will be published in two weeks' time. The publication can be downloaded digitally here.
“Collings’ art history is truly artist-centric, not at all chronological, and borderline metaphysical. The drawings are a mash-up of fact, gossip, and invention. They include artists, musicians, writers, mystics, biblical figures, political figures, the British royals, and occasionally Collings himself. They address art as a tradition, as a cult, and as a lens through which we can examine the collective conscience of society. They allude to the mystery of creativity and the interconnectedness of those who engage with art. In Collings’ version of art history, timelines get tangled and the membrane between the living and dead is permeable. Collectively, his drawings are not so much a history of art as an art séance.”
Emily Ferranto, New Orleans Review, 2022
Matthew Collings’ first solo exhibition with Vigo showcases the paintings and drawings he has been doing over the last three years, presenting, to a public preconditioned to respect art, an idea of it as radical subjectivity. Beauty exists. Realistic picturing exists. Colour exists. Narrative exists. They’re all real. Collings whips all this stuff up. Ideas, knowledge and originality can all be vividly rethought. Being an “art lover” doesn’t have to mean dutiful obedience. From Yayoi Kusama sticking polka dots to cars, to Richard Prince appropriating the jokes of Rodney Dangerfield, to Jordy Kerwick welcoming an audience to a jungle studio open day, Collings conjures scenes which are familiar if you’ve ever had any experience of art, but that are also dissolved and unhinged in some way, amounting to an “Alternative Art History”.
“We can’t know it, straight,” he maintains. “It’s changing all the time; it’s being reshaped according to new agreements about what reality is. Our world is bizarre now. These artworks make more sense than what the government says. There’s no real art history going on somewhere, full of facts. In any case facts and dates are the least interesting thing about art. The hot stuff is freedom. But how do you see it? What do you need to know? What do you already know that can be released? These questions are what the mood of the pictures — sometimes serious sometimes nonsense — is about.”
COLLINGS (b. 1955, London) is an artist and writer. He studied painting at the Byam Shaw School of Art, London. He is a well-known commentator on art, having written and presented many popular books and TV series. His six-part series This is Modern Art, on Channel 4, produced by Ian MacMillan, won many awards including a BAFTA. His book Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop: The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst was published by David Bowie. Collings was commended by the Turner Prize for his work in transforming the UK art magazine Artscribe into an international publication. He is one half of the painting duo, Biggs & Collings, with his partner, the mosaicist Emma Biggs. Their joint works are based on patterns and are in collections throughout the world. Collings is currently writing an alternative art history for Thames & Hudson, to be released next year. It will be illustrated throughout by his drawings and will extend in written form the whole mix of surrealism, anecdote, philosophising and anarchy that produced them.