Bob Dylan has always worked on other projects concurrently with his music. Since the 1960s he has, among other things, worked with pictorial art. A number of album covers and small-scale exhibitions have been visible signs of Dylan’s early work as a visual artist. According to Dylan, an artist must always be moving and changing, and so an oscillation between different modes of expression strikes him as entirely natural. “I have always painted. I have always held on to that one way or another.”
Dylan created the paintings of The Brazil Series specifically for the exhibition at National Gallery of Denmark, meaning that this is the first time they are accessible to the general public. The series comprises approximately 40 canvases depicting Brazilian scenes, hence the title The Brazil Series. According to Dylan himself, this exhibition is an accurate reflection of his endeavours as a visual artists; an area of work which has received increasingly intensive focus from the artist himself in recent years.
The subject matter in The Brazil Series is gathered from widely different Brazilian settings. All of the scenes depicted take their point of departure in reality as we see it, often incorporating a narrative with a clearly discernable story.
In The Brazil Series Bob Dylan demonstrates his phenomenal powers of observation. He uses his images to tell us stories that range from the everyday and descriptive to the violently dramatic, incorporating strong elements of fiction. The stories from Brazil flow out to reach us from the cracks opened by the artist; each fragment adding another aspect to the overall journey Dylan invites us to take.
