‘The Garden of Wasted Things’ – Exhibition of paintings by Bohuslav Barlow
Thursday October 30th 2008 – Tuesday 4th November 2008.
The Peter Pears Gallery, 152 High Street, Aldeburgh.
For a preview of some of the new works on offer see the images within ‘The Gallery’ tab section of this page. Altenatively click this link to see the original summer exhibition catalogue: The Garden of Wasted Things – Exhibition Catalogue
Following on from the huge success and critical acclaim of the opening show in the summer, ‘The Garden of Wasted Things’ exhibition moves to Aldeburgh this autumn with the release of many previously unexhibited paintings with an emphasis on this still life, landscape and nude works of this most extraordinary of artists. The collection illustrates the enormous range of his talent and breadth of his abilities with all media, with a number of oils, pastels and mixed media on offer. All are welcome to attend, and there will be a special drinks evening on Saturday 1st November. For an invitation please contact Graham Blakesley on the e mail address below.
Bohuslav Barlow’s works have their roots, to a large extent, in a history of post war displacement and childhood alienation that made isolation a condition of his life and which has fed into his unique art. As Jeff Nuttall wrote: ‘Isolation is first a condition and then an exercise. Barlow was isolated by family orientation and by his complete disinterest in the obligatory abstraction being doled out like cheap religion at the Central School when he was a student. Czech-German with a black stepfather, living in England. A person to whom alienation has become vital.’
Born as Bohuslav Klos in a small town in Upper Moravia, Czechoslovakia, in 1947, he never knew his father. After fleeing to Germany with his mother who soon moved to England, he lived with his grandparents for eight years before joining her and an American Guyanan stepfather, from whom he took the name Barlow, to live in abject poverty in Northern England.
It was here that, with crayons and pencils as his only toys, the profoundly unhappy Bohuslav discovered his metier as an artist, giving him release from a comfortless childhood with ‘the drizzle of desperate circumstances’. After school Bohuslav followed a year at Manchester School of Art before going on to the Central School of Art in London, where as a figurative painter he was somewhat out of step with the prevailing expressionist and Pop Art trends and isolation again became a feature of his existence.
After graduating and various solitary travels abroad, a chance visit on his motorbike to Blackburn took him through Todmorden. The bleak and wild scenery of the Pennines immediately appealed to him and perhaps for the first time in his life he felt at home. He has lived and worked in Todmorden for the past 35 years. He is known locally as ‘Slavo’.
The dark and somewhat brooding vistas of railway viaducts, packhorse bridges and structures form the back drop to much of his work, but the alarming angles of his compositions and the cast of characters and ‘props’ that are used to fantastical effect are very different. A medley of strange beings inhabits these paintings in surreal, melodramatic scenes where one feels there is a sort of personal mythology being played out.
If the symbolism in many of Bohuslav’s paintings is meant to give us clues, then we are left to work it out for ourselves. His early life, perhaps, where isolation meant he had to construct his own alternative world may help us, but the artist himself says he does not know. Ultimately these enigmatic, strangely beautiful paintings must speak for themselves.
For further details and more images please contact:
Graham Blakesley
mpgb@mac.com