Jeremy Dickinson’s enthusiastic dedication to the methodical and meticulous reproduction on canvas of all sorts of vehicles reveals his life-long passion for transportation: cars, buses, trucks, cranes, containers, are all rendered in every detail with the same zeal and devotion he showed as a child to his miniature cars.
In his second solo show at Xippas Gallery in Athens, Dickinson is presenting small and large scale works from 2008-2009.
Dickinson doesn’t allow himself any omissions, any distortions of reality. The meticulous reconstruction, resembling a photograph, alludes both to the collector’s obsession with the object of his passion and to the adult’s wish to revive a memory and immortalize its content.
Although the vehicles depicted in Dickinson’s works at first glance seem to be true copies of real vehicles, the expert eye will soon realize that they are only children’s toys, models, miniature cars, reproductions of a reproduction. Some of them have belonged to him since his childhood—a green J on the underside denoting such possession—while others were later added to his collection; they bear the scars of the wear and tear caused by play.
Set against a neutral colour background that provides absolute freedom of movement, the vehicles often form a line – resembling a procession – or ellipsoid curves, occasionally exceeding the canvas’ limits. In other works, the vehicles are stacked upon one another in a fragile and uncertain balance. In some instances they are grouped by type or colour, this being the case with the British buses and double-deckers for which Dickinson used bus-lovers’ amateur photographs he found at flea markets and motor rallies.
There are static works and livelier ones. In the latter, the vehicles escape from the confines determined by their role as models and interact with each other while the composition appears to be part of an activity that takes place outside the canvas. Other small objects, mementoes from his childhood, may occasionally intrude – a cactus, a Swiss miniature cow, a scarecrow, or coloured building bricks that multiply in his recent works creating walls within which miniature cars and super-balls are crammed, bringing to mind in a humorous way “maps” with local English football teams.
Jeremy Dickinson was born in 1963 in Yorkshire, England. He studied at Goldsmith’ s College and he lives and works in London. He has had one-man shows in Europe (Horsens Museum, Denmark 2004, HammerSidi Gallery, London 2004, Galerie Xippas, Paris 2005, 2001, etc), in the USA (Sara Meltzer Galley, New York 2008, Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco 2006, 2001, 1998, Angles Gallery, California 2006, 1998), Japan (Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo 2008, 2002, 2000), and South Korea (Seomi & Tuus, Seoul, 2007, 2002, etc) and has participated in many group exhibitions.
