Neal Fox - Lust for Life

About

Neal Fox’s rather strange world is populated by icons of the beat generation and pop culture, by legendary figures from the universe of jazz and rock, art, literature, and film, mostly by those who were in some way subversive, both in terms of their personality as well as with their work.

The beholder who engages with this absurd, sometimes carnivalesque universe that is often permeated by a delicate irony, can expect absolutely anything: dinosaurs in front of William S. Burroughs “bunker” on New York’s Bowery 222, Allen Ginsberg as a hitchhiker somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico, Charles Bukowski in a tête-à-tête with Minnie Mouse, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Billie Holiday at the backdoor of a jazz club with John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac, and Willem De Kooning, or Marlene Dietrich at David Bowie’s and Iggy Pop’s flat on Berlin’s Hauptstrasse 155.

When he invents stories with a pen or brush in hand, the young British artist by no means limits himself to the Anglo or Afro American world – a series of eight ink drawings in our exhibition focuses on the Roaring Twenties in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.

When Neal Fox draws, he follows a stream of consciousness and delves into a world of dreams. "I'm trying to be a kind of surreal archaeologist, excavating icons and mythology from our shared history of pop culture and rearranging it in new ways, to create a new mythology."

As a child, Neal Fox, born in 1981 in London, was a great fan of Tintin, Robert Crumb’s comics, and Monty Python films, and later he explored the work of William Hogarth and Hieronymus Bosch, Otto Dix and George Grosz, all of whom influenced him. Since hewas a student at the Royal College of Art, Neal Fox has been part of the artist collective LE GUN, which publishes the eponymous art magazine and creates installations, which are, as it were, three-dimensional drawings.

He has created illustrations for The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, Dazed and Confused, Faber and Faber, Absolut, for Pete Doherty’s Babyshambles and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Since 2006, his work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Munich, London, New York, Paris, Rome, and Berlin, as well as at the art fairs Art Brussels, Artissima, Drawing Now, FIAC and Art Basel. The British filmmaker Peter Bach is currently working on a TV documentary about Neal Fox.