“Everyone should own a Beezy B

“Everyone should own a Beezy Bailey” – David Bowie

Bailey’s new solo exhibition opening at Everard Read in London tomorrow embraces the entire spectrum of Bailey’s creative output which has developed over his thirty-five-year career, including sculpture, paintings and prints. Bailey says he creates art: “As a balm for a mad world – a corrective for our most lamentable human qualities, including a planet […]

“Everyone should own a Beezy B

Bailey’s new solo exhibition opening at Everard Read in London tomorrow embraces the entire spectrum of Bailey’s creative output which has developed over his thirty-five-year career, including sculpture, paintings and prints.

Bailey says he creates art: “As a balm for a mad world – a corrective for our most lamentable human qualities, including a planet brutalized by extremes of wealth and poverty, environmental ignorance and negligence.”

Many of his works emanate from his abiding concern with the Anthropocene, the present epoch characterized as the time in which the collective activities of Homo sapiens began to substantially alter the earth’s surface, atmosphere, oceans, and systems of ecological recycling.

Bailey has a history of close collaboration with other artists, including David Bowie, Brian Eno and Dave Matthews. In Brian Eno’s words: “Beezy makes his art out of joy and laughter (and sometimes out of terror). He is somebody to whom art comes easily and who doesn’t feel guilty about it, who revels in his gift and has confidence in it – like a chef gleefully throwing ingredients in by the handful without ever measuring them. He cooks up new worlds, tiny and huge, peopled by bird-women, snake-men, lizard children, and animated vegetables, bursting with bright new music. He makes African jazz in paint, garish as the midday sun, dark as the deepest night.”

Often Bailey’s works are accompanied by poems, such as 1000 Year Dance Cure, in which he exhorts the world to dance a new dance, to abandon that which does not serve us, and to embrace each other in our humanity, and the earth in her service to us. The sources of his imagery are elusive. In his own words: “Frozen dreams, images and legends enter from my subconscious, the realm of my imagination. I act as a conduit for visual messages greater than I am.”

Richard Cork, art historian, editor, critic and exhibition curator, who is writing an essay for the first monograph of Bailey’s work, spanning thirty-five years of artistic endeavour to be published by CIRCA Press in October 2018, says of Bailey, “Looking back over Beezy Bailey’s restlessly inventive career, we soon become fascinated by its defiant unpredictability. At every turn his work is filled with surprises and united above all by a fundamental urge to challenge the status quo.”

Over the past three decades, Bailey has exhibited extensively in South Africa and around the world. He was part of the official program at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and in 2011 the Chenshia Museum in Wuhan, China staged a retrospective exhibition. Everard Read has represented Bailey for almost 15 years. This is his 11th solo exhibition with Everard Read.

‘Light Beyond the Dark’ 23 March – 21 April 2018
Everard Read London
80 Fulham Road London SW3 6HR
+44 (0) 20 7590 9991
info@everardlondon.com
www.everardlondon.com