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Exhibition of Bob Dylan paintings will be shown in New York
  • | The New York Times | September 20, 2011 07:24 PM

From the rubble-filled streets of Rome to the sunny, aqua-blue skies of Mozambique, Bob Dylan has traveled the world in his music and his real-life exploits.

“Opium,” a painting created by Bob Dylan in 2009.

Now a series of his drawings and paintings that chronicle his journeys in Asia will be coming to the Gagosian Gallery, the first time that Mr. Dylan’s art will be exhibited in New York City, the gallery said.

The exhibition, “The Asia Series,” will run at the Gagosian on the Upper East Side from Sept. 20 through Oct. 22, and will include works that Mr. Dylan created on trips to Japan, China, Vietnam and South Korea. (Dylanologists will recall that the singer-songwriter played his first shows in China and in Vietnam last spring.)

The gallery said in a news release that Mr. Dylan’s works would offer “firsthand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape” with evocative titles like “Mae Ling,” “Cockfight,” “The Bridge” and “Hunan Province.”

The release added: “Conversely, there are more cryptic paintings often of personalities and situations, such as ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Opium,’ or ‘LeBelle Cascade,’ which looks like a riff on Manet’s ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe’ but which is, in fact, a scenographic tourist photo-opportunity in a Tokyo amusement arcade.”

Mr. Dylan’s paintings have previously been shown in Chemnitz, Germany (where the exhibition “The Drawn Blank Series” opened in 2007), the Statens Museum in Copenhagen (where his “Brazil Series” was shown in 2008) and any rec room where the cover of his “Self Portrait” album has been prominently displayed.

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