BILLY CHILDISH: LIKE A GOD I LOVE ALL THINGS
Lehmann Maupin presents like a god i love all things, an exhibition of new paintings by British painter Billy Childish. Based in Kent, Childish’s artistic practice is wide ranging and prolific.
January 30 - February 15, 2025
In addition to painting, the artist moves seamlessly between poetry and prose, punk rock, blues and folk music, photography, and printmaking. Over the course of his decades-long career, he has written and published 5 novels, more than 40 volumes of confessional poetry, and recorded well over 170 LPs. Childish’s paintings are often characterized by their vivid immediacy, painted directly on warm linen canvas using a rich, earthy palette of oil paint.
The artist’s subjects are drawn from both his immediate environment—the North Kent landscape and members of his family—as well as further afield, including scenes of northern California and historical photographs, often appearing other-worldly or what Childish has described as dreamscapes. like a god i love all things marks the first exhibition in 2025 at Lehmann Maupin’s temporary space, located at No.9 Cork Street in London’s Mayfair neighborhood.
In Childish’s latest body of work, the winter landscape is his central theme, both wild and serene. The paintings on view comprise a series of quietly beautiful scenes featuring low hanging winter suns, cool mists, and sombre trees. Childish’s compositions are dark, but not gloomy, reflective of the season and glowing with their own internal luminosity. Although mostly devoid of figures, in some canvases wolves make their way out of the woods or deer cross snow-covered fields. In these works, viewers are reminded that life continually moves through its own natural rhythms, even in the seemingly still depths of winter.
As a whole, the works in like a god i love all things remind us of the quiet solace that can be found in darker months, deep in the woods or amidst a frozen field. In these spiritual landscapes, Childish asserts that the transcendent is often most accessible in moments of direct connection with natural beauty, residing always in the world around us.