Coinciding with his Rail Car sculpture unveiling at Château La Coste, Bob Dylan’s exceptional first painting exhibition in France, Drawn Blank in Provence presents the artist’s work in a new context, highlighting novel aspects of Dylan’s artistic practice.
Infused with the radiant light of Provence and displayed in Château La Coste’s Renzo Piano-designed art gallery, this exhibition presents 23 unseen canvases from The Drawn Blank Series, an important collection of Bob Dylan’s work created between 2007-2009.
Capturing passing snapshots of life on the road, anonymous figures and hidden-away places, the paintings are based on images sketched by Dylan, reflecting his travels in Europe and America between 1989-1991. The diverse scenes – still-life, landscape, cityscape, seascape, or portrait – are enlivened with Dylan’s varied perspectives and bursts of intense, piercing colour. Compositions of earthy tones alongside soaring blues unite select groupings of paintings, irrespective of subject matter.
As art historian Joachim Pissarro describes, within this ‘Dylan-esque entanglement of forms and colours, allusions to the art historical canon echo from his canvases’. Works by some of the most important Impressionist and modern artists, including Claude Monet, Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall, are exhibited here opposite Dylan’s canvases to shine light on some of his artistic inspirations.
A focus display of one of Dylan’s large-scale triptych landscapes, created in 2021, is also installed in the Richard Rogers Drawing Gallery until 5th June, to run alongside the unveiling of Rail Car.