Press Release
Mr Paul David Chisholm &
Hoxton 253 Gallery, London are pleased to present
The Lost Children of Paradise
DTBC 2021
For more information and Press Inquiries please contact info@hoxton253gallery.com
Reflections on the Many Faces of Public and Private Selves Through Paul Chisholm’s The Lost Children of Paradise
Text by Wil Ceniceros
Although much of Chisholm’s artwork can be seen as recognizing the progress made in HIV research and treatment, his artwork serves to reminds viewers of the persistent stigma associated with the disease and reveals the need to continue raising awareness on the subject matter. Anchoring Paul Chisholm’s recent body of artworks is a series of clown paintings, which transport us into a journey that includes a dark and invisible, yet omnipresent reality Chisholm has been experiencing. In the clown paintings, we see Chisholm extending his exploration of the themes of ‘public and private selves’ previously seen in Lost Boys (2017) and he creates a new visual language through the figuration of portrait-like clown faces. It is these themes of ‘public and private selves’ that are relevant to all human beings regardless of age, gender or background and which make Paul Chisholm stand out as a noteworthy contemporary artist.
How can an artist represent the dark and invisible world of individuals living with HIV, trauma and mental illness? In 1949 Theodor Adorno pronounced that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” a hyperbolic rejection to the aestheticization of all forms of post-traumatic expression. Instead, Adorno suggests that art ought to be transformed “from the harmonic and knowable to the jarring and irresolvable”1 and argues that “mimesis in its physiological, somatic dimension is Angleichung, a becoming, or making similar, a movement toward, never reaching a goal. It is not identity, nor can it be reduced to nonidentity together as nonidentical similitude and in unresolvable tension with each other.
CONTEMPORARY ARTIST Paul David Chisholm (b. 1983, Canterbury, UK) started his art education in Nottingham Trent University (Class of 2004) before completing a Master’s in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts (Class of 2019). His artistic practice includes painting, sculpture and performance art, and it is through these various mediums and their subject matter that he creates a visual language exploring themes regarding his homosexuality, sexual abuse trauma, mental illness and politics. Among the artworks Paul Chisholm became widely known for is his sculpture Viral Load 2010, a black dildo covered with glass-headed pins which he created as a response to his HIV diagnosis and referred to by the media as ‘the world’s most painful sex toy’. Chisholm has donated artworks to charity organizations such as the Terrence Higgins Trust who have auctioned the pieces at Christie’s auction house in London to help support people living with HIV across the UK. In 2011, Chisholm’s artworks Fuck Me I Have Love & H*I*V was exhibited alongside Felix Gonzalez Torres, General Idea in the New York exhibition ‘Mixed Messages,’ a benefit for the US-based non-profit organization Visual AIDS, which raises awareness and dialogue around HIV/AIDS. The most recent 2019 Terrence Higgins Trust auction at Christie’s featured Chisholm’s oil on canvas painting, Lost Boys (2017), which alludes to the boys lost to HIV, AIDS and related suicide deaths while exploring the “juxtaposition between public and private selves and the battle to survive.”
HOXTON 253 is a London based non-profit artist run gallery and project space, providing an experimental platform to emerging and mid-career artists.
Our aim is to nurture creative talents and to build a community of artists and local residents with the objective to provoke critical dialogue within contemporary culture and society.
As a green and sustainability-conscious initiative, our passion lies in creating environments that takes a stance on our communal and individual responsibilities in regards of our societal and political position in the world, while also dedicating particular attention to highlighting artistic voices that challenge the current untenable system and promote a healthier and sustainable future.
