Charlie Billingham
Charlie Billingham exhibited with Collective Ending as part of ABSINTHE §1.
Charlie Billingham, Court, 2018 (ABSINTHE §1)
Bio
Charlie Billingham produces paintings, prints and site-responsive installations using expanded approaches to painting that refer to the history of British Satirical print, both through their uses of graphic boldness and in their repeated appropriations of fractured imagery whose details quote Gillray, Rowlandson and a Hogarthian comic narrative tradition. Although we can identify things in Charlie Billingham’s work as part of a certain idea of the past – baggy britches, towering wigs, swags of jewellery, vaguely scatological humour – their presentation (in bits, in fragments) suggests a kind of dispersal, a refusal to fully cohere. Billingham holds the bits at bay: the past stays past. Late 18th and early 19th century motifs – big Regency bums in wigs or britches; bonnets with cascading feathers; big-buttoned waistcoats – are repeated in an array of decorative colours, either as wallpaper or as reversible motifs on canvases.
Charlie lives and works in London. He received his Post Graduate Diploma from Royal Academy Schools in 2013, having previously completed his BA and MA in Fine Art and History of Art at The University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art (2008). Recent exhibitions and projects include: Hand Gestures (Solo Exhibition) at Galería Travesía Cuatro (Guadalajara, 2020), A Rake’s Progress (Solo Exhibition, curated by Humberto Moro) at SCAD Museum (Savannah, 2019), Cornucopia (Solo Exhibition) at MAZ Museo de Arte de Zapopan (Mexico, 2019), Crowd (Group Exhibition) at Hannah Barry Gallery (London, 2020), Les Métamorphoses. Jeunes Artistes en Europe (Group Exhibition, curated by Thomas Delamarre) at Fondation Cartier (Paris, 2019), Objects to Identify (Group Exhibition) at Moran Moran (Los Angeles, 2018).