The most celebrated singer-songwriter of our time, Bob Dylan’s visual art is marked by the same constant drive for renewal that characterizes his legendary music. Although he has been making art since the 1960s, his work was not publicly exhibited until 2007 when an exhibition of “The Drawn Blank Series” was held in Chemnitz, Germany, followed by “The Brazil Series” at the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, in 2010–11. He often draws and paints while on tour, and his motifs bear corresponding impressions of different environments and people. A keen observer, Dylan is inspired by everyday phenomena in such a way that they appear fresh, new, and mysterious. He combines a wide range of popular styles, the sources of which he has reshaped to produce new conflations of image and meaning. His work provides a glimpse of an artistic process that is equally maverick and elusive.
Bob Dylan was born in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. He studied at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, from 1959 to 1960. Dylan’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions worldwide. Recent solo exhibitions include “The Drawn Blank Series,” Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Germany (2007, traveled to the City Art Centre, Edinburgh; Asahi Exhibition Centre, Tokyo; and Accademia Albertina delle Belle Arti, Italy, through 2010); “The Brazil Series,” National Gallery of Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst), Copenhagen (2010); “The New Orleans Series,” Palazzo Reale, Milan (2013, traveled to the New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana, through 2016); “Face Value,” National Portrait Gallery, London (2013, traveled to the Museum of National History, Copenhagen; Butler Museum, Ohio; Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Germany; and Kent State University Museum, Ohio, through 2016). Dylan was awarded the US National Medal of Arts in 2009 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.
Dylan currently lives and works in Malibu, California.
