(Miami) Bob Dylan has been telling stories through his songs for 60 years, but recently the American lyricist has also captured moments in a new series of paintings which, like his songs, are intimate and a bit of a mystery.
The Nobel Laureate’s most comprehensive visual art exhibition to be held in the United States will be on Tuesday in Miami at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum. Forty new pieces by the 80-year-old songwriter will be presented for the first time.
The exhibition with more than 180 acrylics, watercolors, drawings and metalwork sculptures will begin the same week as Art Basel Miami Beach and will run until April 17 with no stops announced at this time. Tickets are priced at $ 16 and are reserved by time slot.
“Retrospectrum” includes some of Dylan’s works from the 1960s, starting with pencil sketches he made of his songs such as Highway 61 Revisited and Like a Rolling Stone. His pieces, borrowed from private collections around the world, also include abstract sketches from the 1970s and are displayed in six large rooms, but the vast majority have been created in the past 15 years.
“He was recognized in every way possible as a writer, composer, singer, performer, etc. Now is the time when the audience sees the last element as well, ”said Shai Baitel, who designed the show as artistic director of the Shanghai Museum of Modern Art, where it debuted. “Dylan is able to express himself in so many ways. ”
A breathtaking giant canvas of a sunset in Monument Valley on the Utah-Arizona line serves as an introduction to Dylan’s latest works. He mentioned his admiration for Western filmmaker John Ford, who used this same iconic landscape in several of his films.
Past the wall with the painting of the reddish mounds is a room with the new series entitled “Deep Focus”, named after a cinematographic technique where nothing is blurred.
“All of these images come from films. They try to highlight the different difficult situations people find themselves in, ”Dylan reportedly said on one of the walls. “Dreams and plans are the same – life as it comes to you in all its forms. ”
Dylan offers a lot of city life as the artists of the Ashcan School advocated when they depicted lifelike images of people’s struggles at the turn of the 20e century.
A jazz band is playing in a colorful club in one of the paintings; a gray-haired man counts wads of banknotes in another. It depicts two men fighting in a boxing match and depicts a woman sitting alone in a bar drinking and smoking with an intriguing look on her face.
The exhibit has interactive displays for music lovers. The 64 cards with words from the lyrics of Subterranean Homesick Blues which he leafed through in one of the earliest music videos ever made were framed and aligned in eight columns by eight rows, while the clip played on a loop.
It is not yet known if Dylan, who is currently on tour for his 39e album Rough and Rowdy Ways, will visit the exhibition.
Jordana Pomeroy, director of the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, said it will be her first paid event since the museum opened in 2008. Florida International University will be hosting a Dylan Symposium inviting academics to discuss the entire work of the songwriter.
“This is our treatment for Bob Dylan,” said Mme Pomeroy.