Anthony Wilkinson is pleased to announce a series of weekly solo presentations in the smaller gallery space. The first being Richard Billingham with two early works ‘Ray in Mirror’ & ‘Diptych’ dated 1990. These two pivotal works both black & white were key to what eventually became the now famous series and book ‘Rays a Laugh’ (1996), capturing raw, intimate, candid portraits of his family and immediate surroundings. Originally taken as reference material for paintings he was working on at the time. In ‘Ray in Mirror’ – Ray (his father), toothless, is caught in a laughing grimace in a dusty mirror. In a Guardian review Adrian Searle described it as ‘A profound image, a terrible and terrifying image. It goes right through me. It is incontrovertible. It transcends its own cliché and anything I might say about it’. ‘Diptych’ – features two near identical ghost like images of Ray sitting on the bed – blurred, grainy and dusty. In ‘Ray in Mirror’ and ‘Diptych’ there is a darkness – as if the subject is slipping/fading away. In the early black & white images a lot were out of focus and printed up with imperfections which seemed to accentuate the fragility of life. Billingham also said of these images ‘I wanted to show I wasn’t really bothered about photographs, I was just bothered about the pictures’. The gallery will do a larger solo exhibition with Richard Billingham later in the year.
For further information please contact info@anthonywilkinsongallery.org