Beezy Bailey exhibition continues in Cape Town, works to be shown in New York
A solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Beezy Bailey, Bring on the Dancing Trees, is running at the Everard Read gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, from September 9 to 26. The artist's works will also be presented at The Armory Show fair in New York from September 25 to 27, TimesLIVE reports.
Bailey holds British and South African citizenship and has worked in art for more than four decades. He previously collaborated with musicians David Bowie, Dave Matthews and Brian Eno.
Love, nature and anxiety about the world
In the new series, the artist combines themes of love, joy, nature and humanity with anxiety about the direction in which, in his view, the world is moving. Motifs in his works include crowns, horses, ships, birds, fairy-tale imagery, masks, wild dogs and dragonflies. Bailey describes some of his works as meditations on the Anthropocene.
The artist speaks of concern over the disappearance of fish, birds and insects, as well as the problems of forced displacement and war. He noted that he does not deliberately create propagandistic illustrations, but seeks to transform negative experience into creativity. Bailey destroys, repaints or reworks paintings and sculptures with which he is dissatisfied.
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Abstraction and sculptures of dancers
For this exhibition, Bailey for the first time left some canvases in a more abstract phase, without turning them into figurative subjects. According to the artist, this is meant to allow viewers to imagine their own stories and dream.
Bailey creates sculptures of dancing figures from forms he finds in chainsaw-worked pieces of wood, then casts them in bronze. He named his late mentor, Venda artist Nelson Mukhuba, as an important influence; Mukhuba taught him to see images of mythical people and animals in tree branches. The new sculptures are inspired by Henri Matisse's painted dancers and are intended to convey the joy of life, unity and happiness.
Bailey calls his process “dream reality”: without a prior concept, he makes rough brushstrokes and, among other things, pulls canvases with wet paint through one another, creating abstract traces.
