CHRIS GOLLON: Life in Paint : Online Exhibition to coincide with documentary World Premiere at Barbican Centre & Theatrical Release

Following the success of the  World Premiere of the new documentary 'CHRIS GOLLON: Life in Paint' (85 mins) at the Barbican Centre in October, the film will now enjoy a limited theatrical release in London and New York in 2025, beginning with The Garden Cinema on 4th March 2025.  Part of the Doc 'N Roll Festival, it features Thurston Moore, Maggi Hambling, Eleanor McEvoy, Yi Yao, leading art historians and writers, BBC archive and found footage of Chris Gollon (1953 -2017) painting in his studio.

This mini-survey exhibition of Gollon’s work, follows the chronology of the documentary, showing works in private or museum collections, or from the Chris Gollon Estate.  Selected works show how he used music in three different ways to create imagery that related to people, and to keep painting alive in a period in the late 1990s to 2000s when people were saying it was dead. Also included are selected religious works, such as Gollon’s highly-acclaimed  Fourteen Stations of the Cross, recently featured on BBC1's Gareth Malone's Easter Passion. Not being a churchgoer, for these large site-specific works, Gollon took the unusual decision to use his own son as the model for Jesus, which increased the emotional intensity. Although, as Gollon admits in the documentary, it was a decision he came to regret, since he had to paint his own son dead.

In his first great series on a theme 'On The Road to Narragonia' (1995 - 1998) art historian Mary Rose Beaumont noted Gollon's "fine sense of the ridiculous", placing him in the Northern European tradition of painters such as Breughel and Bosch, depicting our human capacity for folly. 

A defining moment came in 1998:  Thurston Moore sent Chris Gollon, Yoko Ono, David Bowie, Gavin Turk and others each a different  a 52-second tape, challenging them to make a work of art in response. This led to 'ROOT' a crossover exhibition of music and art at the Chisenhale Gallery, London. It became the fillip to Gollon's 19-year fascination with artistic boundary crossing, to collaborations with Grammy-nominated classical virtuoso and composer Yi Yao and with Irish singer-songwriter Eleanor McEvoy.  The exhibition highlights work from these fruitful two-way collaborations.

In 2005, Gollon's 'Einstein & The Jealous Monk (after Bob Dylan)' was purchased by the Huddersfield Art Gallery, where it was hung in the permanent collection alongside Francis Bacon's 'Figure Study (II)'. Works included from 2009, when Gollon became the first non-academic to be made a Fellow and First Artist in Residence at the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, show how successfully he worked with some of the world's leading thinkers on the Being Human project.  

Selected works show how Gollon innovated acrylic painting, by importing a combination of Old Master techniques of thin washes and glazes, combined with printmaker's rollers and other techniques Gollon discovered making monotypes. With a surge of interest in Gollon's work since his untimely death in 2017, the exhibition and documentary give insights into the mind and working methods of an exceptionally imaginative artist.