Laz would like to announce that the Jonathan Yeo show will up for an extra week! Originally scheduled to end on the 11th of July, the show will now be on until the 18th of July. The Ben Turnbull show will be open from the 25th of July.
Biography
Jonathan Yeo taught himself to paint in his early twenties and carved out a career in the nineties painting pop stars, royalty and Russian mafia. He became a big noise in portraiture, receiving commissions from the likes of Erin O’ Connor, David Walliams, Grayson Perry, Tony Blair and Nicole Kidman. In the noughties Yeo kept up his notoriety by flouting the rules. In 2001 he unveiled a triptych of Blair, Hague and Kennedy whose varying sizes acted as popularity barometers. In 2002 his photorealist paintings for Theo Fennell were pulled from US magazines for their graphic nudity. The next year he caused uproar at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters by dropping the curtain on a full frontal Ivan Massow.
In 2007, after toing and froing with the Dubya Bush camp over a portrait of their leader, Yeo decided to take matters into his own hands and masterminded ‘Bush Porn’ – a collage of the President of the United States made from pieces of hard-core porn. Bush’s furrowed brow is a mishmash of writhing naked flesh while his ear is a ripped-up finger-flick to the laws of the land (showing a sexual act reportedly illegal in the state of Texas). From this, came Blue Period, a show of pornographic images of celebrities, artists and nudes. Yeo gained wide-spread recognition for a controversial portrait of Tony Blair with a blood-red poppy in 2007 and commissions from the world’s glitterati continue to flood in.
Opinions on the route Yeo follows are divided. The National Portrait Gallery describes Yeo’s work as a combination of “photographic realism and a painterly touch”, Dennis Hopper describes it as “timeless and exquisite”, and the US Republican party calls it “extremely distasteful”.
News
As an avid art enthusiast I have been collecting works by a few of your roster including Conrad Haringey, Anthony Mic-aloof, Stanley Underwood, Paul Inspect and the like.
So imagine my surprise / amusement when I turned up to view the new work by Jonathan Yeo - an artist whom I'd previously judged to have some decency and decorum. With eyebrows raised, I realised that in some sort of visual pun, the elegance of the british nude had been reinterpreted using adult imagery.
Fantastic. Thank you, Lazarides, for putting more than a smile on Lucien Freud's face, and showing Bush for exactly what he is ... Whatever next? Dick Cheney? Or has that already been done?
Yours amusingly,
WK. Burnside
East Sheen
Nota Bene: the names, places and titles of works in this piece have been changed to protect the guilty.
The day before our opening preview, we found Kelsey “Jesus with a tan” Brookes, wandering the streets by the river looking for tramps to have beard-offs with. Nothing unusual about that of course, just that Kelsey doesn't live in Newcastle, he lives in San Diego and had decided to pop over for the opening of our spanking new gallery, as you do when you're only 6,000 miles round the corner. Quite how Antony Micallef, Jonathan Yeo, Zevs, Ben Turnbull and Miranda Donovan found their own way from London to Newcastle is anyone's guess, we don't even titter at questions like “which tube line stops there?” anymore. But find it they did, a great venue in a great city. Find it for yourself, it's obviously not difficult.
Thanks to Tiger beer for understanding “it's Newcastle, we'll need twice as much beer as they do in London”.
