PRESS RELEASE
New Works by
Vaughan Grylls
PUBLIC VIEW: Thursday 3rd May 2018 @ 7-9.30pm
EXHIBITION RUNS
4th - 22nd May 2018
A-side B-side Gallery,
352 Mare Street,
Hackney, LONDON E8 1HR
(opposite Hackney Central Station)
Vaughan Grylls has made two very large works each consisting of a drawing and collage on paper. He has called them Herman’s Sermons (2017) and American Mail (2017).
Herman’s Sermons consists of black, rambling lanes leading to a variety of churches at the top of the work, with, nearer the bottom, pictures of a bicycle being ridden with a boy behind. The boy is Grylls himself in the 1950s and the man riding the bicycle is his father, Herman Grylls, a school teacher and lay reader. In between the lanes are fields and hills constructed as a huge collage out of Herman’s yellowing sermons. The sermons are handwritten in ink in a steady, clear copperplate with very few corrections. It is not possible to read whole sermons, but what snatches one can read show a man with a fine command of English and an intense desire to illuminate his congregations. Thrown in front of the work is an ancient bicycle. This eulogy to Vaughan Grylls’ long-dead father is arresting in its size and complexity and is deeply moving.
American Mail consists of print-outs of angry emails between two American professors. They are plastered all over a large 19th century steam-engined mail train being attacked by Native Americans on horseback with men aboard firing rifles and a machine gun at their assailants. One of the professors is a Trump supporter; the other, his old and bitterly disappointed friend, accuses him in extravagant language, of being a Jewish Nazi. Grylls has been copied into much of the shouting, occasionally intervening, wickedly to stimulate it.
Juxtapositions exist everywhere – 1950s rural England, conservative, contemplative against today’s America, shouty, conflicted; the even copperplate handwriting constructed sentence by well thought-out sentence against the digital age of instant emails, the bike squeaking along deserted country lanes against the speed and noise of a steam engine with thundering horses in pursuit, the loving relationship between the father and son against two men in a kind of martial combat.
In this powerful contemporary diptych, Vaughan Grylls appears to have created a medieval morality work for the modern age.
Gallery opening hours: 10-5pm Friday–Tuesday, 12noon-5pm & 7-9.30pm Thursday
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