Leytonstone News

Leytonstone artist shines at Venice Biennale

Paul Dash, a celebrated artist and Bushwood resident of 30 years, is showing work at the prestigious international cultural exhibition this summer

By Marco Marcelline

Paul Dash, Credit: Jake Green

A Leytonstone artist has described his joy at his work being selected to show alongside Jean Michel-Basquiat at the prestigious Venice Biennale this year.

Barbados-born Paul Dash, who has lived in Bushwood for more than three decades, contributed Revellers Celebrate at Dusk to In Praise of Black Errantry, a group exhibition that portrays the power of radical imagination among Afro-diasporic artists.

Writing on Instagram, Paul said it was an “honour” to be involved in the exhibition and to have his work shown alongside “some wonderful artists from both sides of the Atlantic”.

The painting depicts a colourful scene of Black people dancing at a street festival. Many of his works are paintings of carnivals because they are ways for African diasporic communities to maintain continuity with African traditions, he has said.

Revellers Celebrate at Dusk, Credit: Paul Dash

Two of Paul’s early works, Talking Music (1963), and a self-portrait from 1979, are currently in Tate Britain’s permanent collection.

Alongside the Tate, Paul has had his work exhibited at the Royal Academy, Barbados Museum,  Whitechapel Gallery, Guildhall Art Gallery, 198 Gallery Brixton, among many more.

In Praise of Black Errantry, on show until 29th June at the 15th Century Palazzo Pisani S.Marina which sits on Venice’s Grand Canal, seeks to show how artists have “refuted conventional codes of representation or pushed against the constraints of formal rules of style, colour, medium or genre towards technical innovation, artistic evolution and liberation”.

Paul also has a mural based on
his painting ‘Bacchanal’ outside
the Good Shepherd Studios in
Leytonstone, Credit: Jake Green

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