Paul Chisholm @ The Terrence Higgins Auction, Christies, London, 2017
BIO
Paul Chisholm (1983) born in Canterbury, England and brought up in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. He studied at Nottingham Trent University (2004) before doing his MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art in London (2018/2019). Chisholm’s practice has been featured on The BBC, The Daily Star, Metro Newspaper, Attitude magazine and more. He came to notoriety in 2017 when he sold “ The Worlds most painful dildo” as dubbed by the press at Christies, London in Aid of the Terrence Higgins Trust. Recent Exhibitions include, The Everyday exhibition, Curated by Visual Aids, La mama Galleria, New York, The Tronie’s of Croydon-Oh at Turf Projects, Croydon, London (2022), Mc Hope at The Brewery Tap Project Space, University of Creative Arts, Folkestone, Kent (2023) and The Queer Britain Art award, Queer Britain Museum, Kings Cross, London (2023)
He lives between Bletchingley in Surrey & Amsterdam, Holland.
“The Artists despair at the world and a fundamental desire to belong and be accepted even in the face of adversity are the truths behind this young artists his practice.”
Artist Statement 2019
" Fusing irony with allegory, Paul Chisholm creates works layered with allusions to his personal history and emotional state, subtly criticising social and political circumstances. Utilising his own experience as a springboard, he has built a distinctive visual language, imbued with poetic nuances of the often contradictory and disconcerting feelings related to the human condition.”Ana Bambic Kostov Art Historian 2018
Chisholm’s artistic practice revolves around conceptual explorations of identity, gender and politics, and it incorporates works completed in different media including painting, photography, installation and objects. Regardless of the material, his works possess a strong communicative quality, bearing messages garnished with both humour and pain. The confluence of bright colours and bold puns unveils the double entendre behind every visual.
“The lost Children of Paradise” is from his newest series of Paintings depicting clowns which reflect both the Artists emotional states and a mirror to society and its ills.
The lost, the lonely, the disposed and the depressed, life is a parade a journey and the lights must go on, it is world of contradictory emotions and parodies, a place of hell and a place of heaven, of need and neglect, distraction, abundance and failure. The image of the clown fascinates Chisholm because of his ability to mask in make up and flamboyance it’s true sadness, The Clown performs and entertains very much like an Artist does. A vagabond, an outsider and a fool dedicated to his Art.
His recent works take these feelings of a contradictory and disconcerting experience of the human condition to new heights exploring the World in the way we portray ourselves and the ways in which we mask our emotions. The circus has long been a fascination for Artists from the 1800 Hundreds. Painting the emotion, the sideshow, the freaks and the outcasts of society. For this series Chisholm also includes the consumerist and nostalgic notion of our lives by placing these paintings upon tins of canned food, highlighting both the capitalist, consumerist and populist ways in which we are treated and consumed by society. Whilst simultaneously ignoring our most human needs to be loved and to love.