View of the exhibition ‘Dexter Dalwood: English Painting’, Lisson Gallery, London, 2024
Can national identity be defined through art? Such is the question that animates the first exhibition of the British artist Dexter Dalwood (Bristol, 1960) at the London gallery Lisson, which has the suggestive title of English Painting. Dalwood has lived and worked in Mexico City since 2021, so this exhibition marks a kind of return to his homeland. “From this relative distance he has begun to reconsider his links with the history of English art and the culture of his youth, having grown up in the Great Britain of the 1970s and 1980s,” the room text explains.
To exhibit again in England, the artist set out to explore traditional genres, such as landscapes or horse portraits, until reaching the movements of the 20th century, including the Bloomsbury Circle and Pop Art. Cultivator of contemporary history painting for more than three decades, Dalwood translates real-world events into imagined and composed landscapes, while acknowledging the weight of those who have gone before him. “His keen understanding of and references to past artistic genres have recently given way to a style of his own that eschews figurative tropes in favor of uninhabited and uncertain spatial concerns, shifting scales, and compressed pictorial planes. Dalwood’s complex pictorial surfaces mix styles and moments from different eras,” the gallery dossier continues.
Exhibition view Dexter Dalwood: English PaintingLisson Gallery, Londres, 2024
An example of the above is the diptych Track and Turf 1754, which repeats in gold that year, when George Stubbs began dissecting and painting horses in Lincolnshire, or Boleskine House 1973which refers to a property next to Loch Ness that Jimmy Page bought when he became obsessed with the activities of its previous owner, the occultist and magician Aleister Crowley. The ghostly face reflected at the foot of the painting is from an album by Black Sabbath, whose vocalist, Ozzy Osbourne, published the song “Mr. Crowley” on their debut album Blizzard of Ozz. “Although the links between these paintings are not usually evident at first glance, among them there are indications and clues of broader themes and features – such as music, mysticism and melancholy – that could be associated with what can be called englishness”, ends the room text.
Thanks to an artistic residency in Oaxaca during 2017 and, later, to his permanent residence in Mexico City (his work could be seen at the MUNAL in 2021), Dexter Dalwood has gotten to know the Mexican painting tradition up close. These ties, increasingly stronger, led him to manage the first exhibition dedicated to José María Velasco in the United Kingdom, which will also be the first dedicated to a Latin American artist at the National Gallery. José María Velasco: A View of Mexico It will occupy the museum from March to August 2025 and will coincide with the 200th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Mexico and the United Kingdom. The curators include Dalwood and Daniel Sobrino Ralston, associate curator of Spanish painting at the National Gallery.
Exhibition view Dexter Dalwood: English PaintingLisson Gallery, Londres, 2024
English Paiting It can be visited at the Lisson gallery in London until December 14.
