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'The works conjure a feeling of transience, a journey from the metropolis to the natural world via road, bridge, rail and air. Together they present a panoramic vision of the American landscape from Dylan’s particular perspective. Dylan’s artwork invites the viewer to participate in a trip from city to country, night time to daytime, around the clock and the calendar. Through music, words and art, Dylan remains restlessly creative, going down the road with his eyes wide open. As he sang in 1965, ‘he not busy being born is busy dying.’
BILL FLANAGAN,2019

'I’ve been around iron all my life ever since I was a kid. I was born and raised in iron ore country – where you could breathe it and smell it every day. And I’ve always worked with it in one form or another.’
Bob Dylan 

Growing up in an area known as the ‘Iron Range’, Dylan was surrounded by industry during his childhood. Reclaimed by the artist, the tools of the past now adorn gates, screens, furniture and wall hangings. With their repurposed parts given a new function, the Ironworks retain both the rawness and the history of their origins. The gates are carefully crafted, and contain symbols, jokes and allusions. They are decorative and they are functional. You can appreciate the gates as art, interpret them as metaphors, or you can simply close them to create peace and safety.

Mondo Scripto features some of Dylan’s most renowned lyrics, handwritten in pen on paper and each accompanied by a corresponding graphite drawing. They demonstrate a direct engagement between his visual art and his songwriting. Dylan’s lyrics can be oblique or straightforward, elevated or conversational. He is a master of the songwriter’s craft. Dylan returns to songs again and again – tweaking and reworking them. In live performance, he often presents a new version of a well-known song. For Mondo Scripto, some songs have had a few lines changed, while others have had verses completely rewritten. The pencil drawings continue this dialogue between past and present, fixed and fluid, conducted by an artist who changed the relationship between music and words forever.

‘He has made himself a prism through which the music, words, images and experiences that he has found meaningful have refracted in endless variation and become wholly his, and wholly ours – the work of an artist for the ages.’
Tom Piazza, Mondo Scripto