Artist: Dexter Dalwood

Dexter Dalwood’s inaugural exhibition with Lisson Gallery represents a return to the artist’s homeland and to the subject of what it might mean to be an ‘English’ painter. After an initial period at a residency in Mexico in 2017, Dalwood moved there to live and work fulltime, since 2022. Now, from this relative distance, he has begun to re-consider his attachments with English art history and the culture of his youth, growing up in 1970s and ’80s Britain. The question of whether national identity can be determined or distilled through art is explored in this new group of paintings that consider the legacies of traditional genres, such as landscape or the lowlier practice of horse portraiture, all the way up to twentieth-century movements including the Bloomsbury Group and Pop Art.

Dalwood’s complex painterly surfaces blend styles and moments from different eras. His diptych Track and Turf 1754 (all works 2023 or 2024) repeats the date 1754 – when Stubbs began dissecting and painting horses in Lincolnshire – in gold across a coloured ground similar to British racing green, next to a detail of a horse painted by Reynolds (considered the more famous and successful artist). Another date painting, Boleskine House 1973, refers to a property next to Loch Ness in Scotland bought by the lead guitarist of Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page, who was briefly obsessed by the nefarious activities of its previous owner, the occultist and black magician, Aleister Crowley, although the ghostly visage reflected at the foot of the painting is from a Black Sabbath record, with lead singer Ozzy Osbourne releasing the song ‘Mr Crowley’. Another glimpsed view occurs within a giant tree trunk, titled Avalon, which splits to partially reveal a scene from Arthurian legend painted by Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones, also a surprising source of inspiration for rock guitarist Page.

Another absent but important figure in the exhibition is David Bowie, whose presence is merely suggested by the title Languid Ziggy. A red, minimalist backdrop is disturbed by a pair of languorous legs, perhaps hinting to the way in which Bowie has embodied ‘style’, from 19th century dandyism all the way to 20th century fashion as high art. A further moment of modernism interrupted here – in Dalwood’s painting Northern Pop – is the work of Jasper Johns, one of whose famous hatched grey paintings has been usurped by English county names – Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire – suggesting a humorous swipe at the greyness of the weather, although not everything Johns labelled was quite as it seemed.

While the links between these paintings are not often immediately evident, among them are hints and clues to wider topics and traits – such as music, mysticism and melancholy – that could all arguably be associated with that intangible term, ‘Englishness’. There are autobiographical nods to the artist’s own musical heritage in images such as Rise Up, a riotously colourful carnival sound system and a clear example of the sample-heavy undertones running through every one of these paintings, as well as in Punk is Dead, recalling the now defunct Roxy Club and Dalwood’s time with Bristol-based punk band The Cortinas.

In addition to upending traditions of painting and reflecting on the status and meaning of cultural moments past, Dalwood also tackles seismic historic monuments and events associated with the heritage of this Sceptred Isle. Bloody Sunday is a numerical panorama that abstracts and honours the 13 civilians killed by British soldiers stationed in Northern Ireland in 1972, while The Blitz makes oblique reference to the removal of paintings from the walls of the National Gallery in expectation of German bombing raids over London in the 1940s.