Neal Fox is a London based artist.
Born in 1981, he studied at Camberwell Art College and the Royal College of Art. While at the RCA he co-founded Le Gun, the art collective and publication of the same name. Since graduating in 2005 Fox’s work depicting a phantasmagoric journey through the detritus and mythology of pop culture has led to solo exhibitions in London, Munich, Berlin and Paris, and group shows from Brussels to Beijing alongside Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys. In 2013 he and Le Gun featured prominently in the exhibition Memory Palace at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Fox has exhibited at the art fairs Art Brussels, Artissima, Drawing Now, FIAC and Art Basel. From a life long fascination with the tales of his dead grandfather, a World War 2 bomber pilot, writer, and hell raiser, Fox’s large scale ink drawings have developed into increasingly layered celebrations of the debauched and iconoclastic characters whose ideas have helped shape our collective consciousness. Remixing and collaging events and connecting trails of thought, he imagines Francis Bacon and William Burroughs taking tea in the ancient Egyptian after life, or Captain Beefheart selling a vacuum cleaner to Aldous Huxley at the Doors of Perception. The British filmmaker Peter Bach is currently working on a TV documentary about Neal Fox.
Chimerical Debauchery
Neal Fox’s ink drawings are chimerical dramas of graphic debauchery, cut with anti-establishment, offbeat and iconic cultural figures. By penning the quixotic worlds of pop-icons, drawn together into fantastical situations, Fox pulls these characters into our physical present while feeding our addiction to escapism and fantasy. His ink unfolds schizophrenic histories of Led Zeppelin and Aleister Crowley; a frenzied Ronald McDonald crucifying Michael Jackson; and an over-crowded boat journey through the Freudian egos of the mind. The viewer is invited to imagine getting loaded with Fox’s protagonists, while on an epic journey through different dimensions, surfacing on the erroneous conglomerations of a thick and complex unreality.
A graduate of the Royal College of Art, London and co-creator of the established Art annual Le Gun, the accomplished draughtsman has exhibited in London, Paris and Germany. Fox’s artistic influences include Robert Crumb, Raymond Pettibon, and Otto Dix; however it is John Watson, Fox’s grandfather, who is the definitive guiding source in the artist’s creative output. Watson was a World War II bomber pilot, chat show host, writer and publisher, who in his post war years sought solace in Soho’s bohemian watering holes. Left with and inspired by embroidered memories of his grandfather’s alternative activities, Fox nominates Watson, always inked in his black hat and overcoat, to act as our tour guide through the artist’s visual narratives.
One such narrative is Fox’s distinguished ten-metre piece 2000 Light Years from Home (2009). The work emerges from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; a trading boat, which escorts such characters as Herge’s Tintin, sails down the Congo while cadaverous natives peer from the jungle, some missing limbs at the hand of Belgian coloniser King Leopold II. The image cascades into a psychedelic Ancient Egypt, where Rolling Stones member Brian Jones undergoes mummification and Francis Bacon takes tea with William Burroughs. Elsewhere in Sangre de los Pervertidos (2012) Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean-French filmmaker and hater of all things Disney, oversees a brutal yet humorous slaughter of his animated enemies and their embodied commercialism. In this scurrilous theatre, Dumbo‘s head is shot straight through; an axe belonging to one of the seven dwarfs has decapitated Tinkerbell; and The Little Mermaid’s fish-tail is bloodily truncated. Other beloved Disney characters lay strewn across the desert floor, and the viewer is invited to take a macabre satisfaction in the drama. Historically, Fox has worked predominantly in black and white, however Sangre de los Pervertidos exhibits his sensitive handling of colour across a large scale work; engaging primary colours are balanced throughout a rhythmic composition, carrying the viewer’s eye comfortably across the cartoon genocide.
Fox’s work avoids being a mere visual objectification of pre-inherited cultural histories; the knotted and multifarious literary, philosophical and artistic references illustrated through Fox’s protagonists and visual situations mean that a multiplicity of rebellious ideas are pitched into visual and abstract dialogue. The viewer is asked to critically engage to bring these artworks to life: the artist’s ocular novels represent ideas that are unorthodox in normative society and so recognising and facilitating the philosophies manifest in his drawings require that the viewer is ‘in the know’. This happily substantiates that alternative modes of knowledge are still shared, ultimately available to popular culture, yet still primarily passed through subversive circuits of communication, such as Fox’s artworks.
Freya Smaill
Vitamin D2 – New Perspectives in Drawing, Phaidon
NEAL FOX BIO
EDUCATION
2005 — MA Communication Art and Design, Royal College of Art, London
2003 — Camberwell College of Art, BA Graphic Design
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2015
Lust for life, Egbert Baque Contemporary, Berlin
2014
Smell the Roses on the Way Along, Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris
2013
Saturnalia, Daniel Blau Ltd, London
2012
Journey to the End of the Night, Galerie Daniel Blau, Munich
Sangre de los Pervertidos, The French House, London
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride, Galerie Michael Schultz, Berlin
2011
BEWARE OF THE GOD, Daniel Blau Ltd., London
2009
2000 Light Years From Home, Galerie Daniel Blau, Munich (cat.)
2008
Little Drop of Poison, LOFT 19, Paris (cat.)
2007
The Invisible Republic, Galerie Daniel Blau, Munich
2006
The Aubergine Tongue, the French House, London (cat.)
GROUP EXHIBITIONS (selection)
2015
Gib Mir das Sommerloch, Anna Jill Lupertz Gallery, Berlin
The Rakish Baal Resurrected — A Tribute to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Egbert Baque Contemporary, Berlin
A Rock n Roll Cathedral, Egbert Baque Contemporary, Berlin
Tales from the Void, Shakespeare and Company, Paris
Drawing Now, Galerie Marie-Laure Fleisch, Paris
2014
There’s a Bluebird in my Heart, Egbert Baque Contemporary, Berlin
Club des Cornichons, Cafe de Flore, Paris
Abracadabra, Egbert Baque Contemporary, Berlin
The Harlot and the Rake, Black’s members club, London
Drawing Now, Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris
Artissima, Galerie Marie-Laure Fleisch, Turin
Iconic/Ironic, Galerie Marie-Laure Fleisch, Rome
2013
Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen
Memory Palace, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Space is Deep, Daniel Blau Ltd, London
2012
Day of the Dead Festival at The Old Vic Tunnels, London
Christie’s Young Collectors, The Museum of Mankind, London
Unfair, By The Pricking of my Thumbs, Lebenson Gallery, Paris
Bare Bones: Damrak & Ruin, Sid Lee, Amsterdam
2011
Never Mind The Bosporus: Guns, Bones & Heretics, Dükkan, Istanbul
Close Eyes To Exit, Red Gallery, London
Ghosts of Gone Birds, A Foundation, London
Bang! Bang!, ARRTCO Collection, Beijing
La Catastrophe: LE GUN & The Black Squid, Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris
Le Gun and The Unknown Room, Bourouina Gallery, Berlin
Le Paris Bar à Paris, Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris
2010
Art Brussels, Le Gun, Brussels
LE GUN for beginners, Material, London
LE GUN + Den Svenska Befolkningen I MAGEN PÅ ETT DJUR, Barnens underjordiska scen, Stockholm,
LE GUN, Galerie Daniel Blau, Munich
LE GUN and friends, Gallery Fake, Tokyo
LE BUM, +ing, Tokyo
Bare Bones 3, NEU Gallery, London
Pulp, The Horse Hospital, London
2009
Bare Bones 2, NEU Gallery, London
Bare Bones 1, Dazed and Confused Gallery, Shoreditch, London
Art Basel 2009, Galerie Daniel Blau, Basel
Salon du Dessin Contemporain, Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris
2008
LE GUN The Family, Rochelle school, A Foundation , London
Art Basel 2008, Galerie Sabine Knust
Salon du Dessin Contemporain, Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris
2007
L.H Brown’s Shoe Shop of Curiosities, London
2006
International Festival LE GUN, Nog Gallery, London
Planet LE GUN, Permanent Gallery, Brighton, UK
2005
Graduation Show, Royal College of Art, London
