Billy Childish

Carl Freedman Gallery is proud to present the house at grass valley, our second solo exhibition by Billy Childish.

Free of irony or superficial novelty, these paintings espouse values of authenticity, spirituality, and beauty, conveying a sense of a vivid physical presence. Above all, they express Childish’s earnest engagement with life.

Rocks, rivers, caves, trees, nudes and the artist himself are recurring motifs. A geographically wide-ranging series of landscapes include a historical site in Northumberland, England imbued with Celtic spiritual significance, the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco, and the rocky outcrops of Althing in Iceland. In some works the mouths of caves suggest the religious motif of the empty tomb, in others a dark, Styx-like river. Present throughout is a quality of quiet melancholy combined with a vibrating, somewhat hallucinatory energy, rendered through Childish’s roiling brushwork.

Billy Childish is a prolific painter, author, poet, publisher, and musician. Born in 1959 in Chatham, Kent, he has extensively exhibited and performed internationally. Exhibitions include Billy Childish: incomprehensible but certainly, Opel Villas Rüsselsheim, Germany (2016), Billy Childish in Print (A Survey), Rochester Art Gallery, Kent (2016), at segantini’s hut, Neugerriemschneider, Berlin (2015), flowers, nudes and birch trees, Lehmann Maupin, New York (2015), darkness was here yesterday, Carl Freedman Gallery, London (2013), Billy Childish. Frozen estuary and Other Paintings of the Divine Ordinary, The Historic Dockyard, Chatham, Kent, Billy Childish: Unknowable but Certain, ICA, London (2010). The artist lives and works in Kent, England.