Billy Childish

This Is The Universe... Big Isn't It?

Carl Freedman Gallery is proud to present This Is The Universe… Big Isn’t It?, a solo exhibition by British artist Billy Childish.

For Billy Childish, painting is not an act of invention but of recognition giving form to something that precedes him. His paintings emerge from this position of receptivity, an openness to forces that are felt rather than constructed which as a position challenges conventional ideas of artistic control and originality. If nothing is truly created or destroyed, then the act of painting becomes one of participation rather than production.

Childish’s art is one of sensual, singular force, rooted in felt experience. It recalls a child absorbed in play, immersed in a world that is both entirely private and fundamentally connected to everything around it. He is “drawn only by the desire to be part of, and impart something of, the wonder of being here.” Each painting arises not from intellectual design but from what Childish describes as shamanic forces entering his consciousness. “They are the energies of nature, the great creation,” he explains. “They want to be painted, so I do as I’m told.” In this sense, authorship becomes secondary. The artist is not the originator but the conduit.

The title of the exhibition, and its central painting, draw from a still of the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger film A Matter of Life And Death, pairing the image with the opening line: “The universe – big, isn’t it?” The phrase carries a disarming simplicity yet opens onto the same expansive condition that underpins all of Childish’s work. It is not an ironic gesture, nor a quotation deployed for effect, but a statement of orientation, an acknowledgment of scale, of wonder, and of the artist’s small but essential place within it.

His portraits are modelled after himself and those close to him. “They represent the universal and the eternal, not the specific,” he explains. In self with crow tattoo, (2025), the figure exists outside of time, not as an individual fixed in biography, but as a vessel for something continuous and shared. This sense of time loosened from chronology extends into a series of painted travel chests, objects that function as repositories of memory. Marked with recurring motifs drawn from different moments in his art and life, they operate as portable constellations of experience: treasure boxes in which fragments of the past are neither fixed nor nostalgic. They suggest a movement not only through space but through time, where what has been lived is not lost, but continually reassembled.

Childish also presents a series of paintings of menhirs, upright stones, among the earliest markers of human presence. Simple and direct, they are stones raised from the ground without clear purpose or explanation. Here, they are neither symbolic nor historical, but immediate forms that hold both deep time and the present at once. Bringing together what is already there – stone, earth, time – and a basic human impulse to mark and take part, they are acts of placement rather than invention.

To remain independent and outside of existing art structures is, for Childish, a necessity. It allows for a state of continual openness, a refusal to become fixed. His life and work reflect a commitment to perpetual becoming who rejected the confines of his time in pursuit of something less bounded. Yet Childish’s rebellion is not without grounding. It is rooted in a deep, almost devotional relationship to process, one that treats making as a form of ritual. Through this ritual, he charts a path toward freedom, allowing creativity to move through him without obstruction. Each painting is an enactment of this condition: not a projection into the future, nor a commentary on the past, but a declaration of presence. In this way, Childish’s work affirms a simple but expansive idea – that everything is already here, and that the role of the artist is to recognise it, to receive it, and to give it form.

“When you look at everything, it is all given. The Universe is given; possibilities are given. That new things can come up, and that they come up, is given. That you can put certain things together, hardware, software, it is all given. The faculties to put them together are given. So there is nothing that you can really create, nothing. You can only put together what is there, and from a standpoint, say, ‘ I’ve created this.’ You can also destroy it and say, ‘I have destroyed this.’ You cannot destroy anything, really speaking. You cannot destroy matter, much less can you destroy energy. Everything is given. And this given can never be seperate from the giver because what is given is the knowledge of the giver. It is all one knowledge that is here. Therefore, the place of worship is everywhere. You view this entire creation as god, in motion, without motion.”
– Swami Dayananda Saraswati