The Andipa gallery in London, will present The Eternal Buzz and the Crock of Gold, an exhibition by the acclaimed singer-songwriter Shane MacGowan. It opens 12 October 2022.
MacGowan’s work, which has been described by the art critic, Waldemar Januszczak, as possessing a ‘demented, wild, fascinating, scabrous kind of energy’, will be represented by twenty small-scale drawings mostly dating from the 1980s. Januszczak has dubbed the work as the ‘Jackson Pollock of the biro’.
Victoria Mary Clarke, MacGowan’s wife, is curating the Exhibition. It is drawn from a body of work that has never been shown in public before.
Describing MacGowan’s artwork, longtime friend Johnny Depp, says of his work:
‘Shane’s visions will speak for themselves. Sometimes they will invoke wonder, sometimes they might appear decidedly threatening, but, regardless of medium, his work will always be full of poetry.’
The artwork which uses a variety of media, is predominantly executed using coloured felt tip and biro. The highly idiosyncratic and often disturbing drawings are scrawled and scribbled onto sheets of paper torn from jotter pads, hotel stationery and aeroplane sick bags. They were created mostly whilst MacGowan toured with his band The Pogues, around the world.
Das Boat depicts a figure in a deep sea diver’s suit floating in inky black water in front of a submarine and spiked sea mine. A note of danger is struck by the airline having become detached from the oxygen supply to the diver’s helmet.
Das Boat sets the tone for the majority of the featured works, many of which were produced while MacGowan was intoxicated or under the influence of drugs, stimulants that lend a wild unpredictability to the artist’s hand.
A number of the drawings refer directly to Pogues songs, such as Hell’s Ditch, the name of the band’s 1990 best-selling album. New York City Sky brings to mind the iconic Christmas ballad, Fairytale of New York, which is frequently cited as the best Christmas song of all time.
Thai Boxers and Thai Teenybop, inspired from the band’s single, Summer in Siam. Anger is an Energy, a refrain from the PiL song, Rise, appears to ape the circular marks made by a Spirograph, albeit in a more irregular fashion.
Another, Bono Drinking Guinness is a portrait of the lead singer of the band U2, a long-time friend of MacGowan, and Grace, a rendering of the model and singer, Grace Jones.
Amongst these are bawdier offerings; drawings containing phalluses with spiralling testicles entering the mouths of purple-haired and befringed females. The word ‘GLORCH!’ appears around each of their heads and these Basquitesque flourishes appear in many of the works.
The show also includes portraits:
Lady Victoria features a pair of pale pink lips surrounded by hundreds of interlocking bubbles. Within this are love hearts, a ringed planet and a solitary crucifix can be found.
Carolan sees the Angel possibly refers to Turlough O’ Carolan, the 17th century blind Celtic harpist and has echoes of the German Expressionists.
The Measure of my Dreams and Woman with Bottle are softer works, in which MacGowan employs watercolour washes, picking out the subjects figures in black ink. Woman with Bottle has a Egon Schiele feel to its execution.
MacGowan’s artworks have been brought together in a 502-page, limited edition monograph. Entitled The Eternal Buzz and The Crock of Gold, it includes a critical essay written by the Sunday Times’ art critic, Waldemar Januszczak, along with contributions by Victoria Mary Clarke, Johnny Depp and Shane himself, as well as unpublished lyrics by the singer and photographs and essays by MacGowan written while he was a schoolboy. For more information about the exhibition contact the Andipa Art Gallery .
