About
“My destiny lay down the road with whatever life invited, had nothing to do with representing any kind of civilisation. Being true to yourself, that was the thing.”
— Bob Dylan
In addition to being one of the most iconic musicians of the modern era, Dylan is a painter, a sculptor, a filmmaker and a best-selling author. He has been awarded America’s Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Arts, the Pulitzer Prize, Sweden’s Polar Music Prize and France’s Officer de la Legion d’honneur. He has won an Oscar and eleven Grammy Awards.
In 2016 Dylan became the first singer-songwriter to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and in 2019, Dylan’s first comprehensive solo museum exhibition opened in the Modern Art Museum Shanghai, Retrospectrum. Visited by over 100,000 visitors in the opening 3 months, it cemented him as one of the most important contemporary visual artists.
‘Bob Dylan truly is one of the most influential cultural icons of our age.' Paul Green, President and Founder, Halcyon Gallery
Bob Dylan (b. 1941) is a worldwide cultural icon who has been inspiring audiences for six decades. Since 1961 he has released 38 studio albums and performed to millions of people across the world. Dylan’s music defies formal definition. Iconic songs such as ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ (1963), ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ (1965) and ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ (1975) have altered the course of cultural history, proving that popular music can be great art.
Having forever changed the relationship between music and language, Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, recognised ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.’ Finding inspiration in social and political injustice, poetry, literature, art, metaphysics, the endless varieties of love and loss, and music of all kinds, Dylan has produced an astonishing catalogue of songs that speak to the hearts of people everywhere, whether the songs were composed last week or fifty years ago.
Although Dylan has been producing visual art since the early 1960s, the first gallery exhibition of his work was not held until 2007, when Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Germany, unveiled The Drawn Blank Series. Since then, Dylan has produced an expansive body of work spanning drawing, painting and sculpture.
