Issuu

Frocks and Buckles II

A

solo exhibition by Charlie Billingham

Exhibition Dates

Thursday 18th September ‘25 –

Sunday 11th January ‘26

Westbourne House 122 Kensington Park Rd London, W11 2EP

Since his days as a student at the Royal Academy Schools, from which he graduated 2013, Charlie Billingham has committed himself to creating paintings that re-invent prints, drawings and watercolours made in Britain mostly during the last few decades of the so-called long 18th century (1688–1815). The genre from which he gleans is caricature, a form of graphic satire characterised by distortion and exaggeration, normally to comical effect. Immensely popular in their day, caricatures were disseminated in the form of prints, which appeared in newspapers or as individual pictures. The key proponents of British caricature in this period were James Gillray (1756–1815) and Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), both of whom were heavily influenced by the painter and printmaker William Hogarth (1697–1764). Britain’s lax censorship laws afforded caricaturists considerable liberty – monarchs and politicians were often objects of their ridicule – allowing the art form to flourish. It is no accident that Britain’s 18th century was dubbed in its own day the ‘age of caricatura’, and thus to quote a British 18th-century caricature is, in some respects, to quote an epoch.

But Billingham’s art is by no means a faithful quotation of the past. It involves constant digression and improvisation as he queries what remains of an image when it is excavated. Having sourced a caricature that speaks to him, he crops it and blows it up, re-delineating it in oil paint on canvas. More often than not, he will be inclined to riff on the original composition, guided by his own painterly spontaneity and the unruliness of paint itself. As such, in Billingham’s inspired flourishes, one senses a fine line between the sourcing of images and their accumulation in muscle memory. His interventions are suggestive of time’s accidents – what remains and what is lost along the way, between then and now, and in the act of looking back at then, now.

Written by Tom Denman

Charlie Billingham

British artist Charlie Billingham (London, 1984) takes cropped sections of imagery from Georgian and Regency-era satirical prints and drawings to make his paintings. Through his cropping and recomposing, he removes the original narratives, isolating particular moments, gestures and expressions, to create new compositions. Through this decontextualisation, the paintings are able to be read with new and ambiguous interpretations. His paintings are often hung on hand painted and printed walls, which are created with stamps made by the artist, based on his watercolour drawings.

Charlie Billingham graduated from Fine Art and History of Art at The University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art (2008) and Fine Art at the Royal Academy Schools, London (2013).