Lost Boys @ The Art Fund Prize Gallery, The Lightbox Museum, Woking, Surrey

Opening on the 6th of November to the 19th!

" 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, the lonely, the disposed and the depressed, life is a parade, a journey and the lights must go on, it is a world of contradictory emotions and parodies, a place of hell and a place of heaven, of need and neglect, distraction, abundance and failure.

Paul Chisholm will present a body of paintings and sculptures from his Lost Boys series which is inspired by the boys lost to the HIV epidemic throughout the decades and related suicide. It also points to the stigma faced by those boys affected by HIV within modern day society.

 

 

 

 

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 (2020. Recent exhibitions include 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