Unknowable but Certain

Artist, musician and writer Billy Childish is a cult figure, and one who has gained an international following, but this is the first time a public institution has brought together a major solo exhibition to encompass his extraordinary career. His prodigious range of activities can best be understood as a total work of art - one which centres on his own persona. Unknowable but Certain presents the vitality of his recent work as a culmination of over three decades’ engagement across different media.

The lower gallery features a group of Childish’s recent paintings, which have an unusual command and power. It includes self-portraits, often shown hill-walking; images of boats on the Medway, the estuary where he lives; still lifes with flowers, featuring pots made by the artist’s mother; and paintings depicting the Swiss modernist writer Robert Walser, including works based on police photographs showing the author dead in the snow. Childish’s paintings are highly expressionistic, conveying a sense of the visionary significance that he discovers in objects, places and people. They also demonstrate the deliberate rejection of the contemporary world that is a feature of all his work.

Billy Childish (b. 1959, Chatham, Kent, United Kingdom; lives and works in Chatham, Kent, United Kingdom) is known for his introspective, autobiographical, and deeply emotional paintings, writing, and music. After leaving secondary school at age 16, Childish worked at the Naval Dockyard in Chatham as an apprentice stonemason. Initially denied an interview to the local art school, he produced hundreds of drawings that gained him entry to London’s Saint Martin's School of Art. Childish's defiance of authority led to his eventual expulsion from art school in 1981. Since then, Childish has attained a cult status worldwide, writing and publishing several novels, more than 40 volumes of confessional poetry and recording more than 170 LPs. This artistic output has always existed in tandem with his central practice as a painter, his devotion to the medium evinced by his uninterrupted flow of work dating back to the late 1970s.

Through all of these disciplines, Childish addresses social, political, and personal issues such as war, protest, his turbulent childhood and his struggles with alcoholism. While his confessional poetry and music explore these issues with startling honesty, Childish’s paintings are more subtle. His subjects are often drawn from his environment or are people he knows or admires, transformed into universal motifs: landscape paintings of his native Kent and other familiar lands, such as the Pacific North West and South West United States, appear alongside self-portraits and people significant to Childish’s life (both cultural and personal), including his American wife, Julie, and his children.