Press release
Don Van Vliet, better known in the music scene as "Captain Beefheart," has long since become a (music) legend. As a painter, he is refreshingly present and direct, so no "legend".
His pictorial world fills beings, they could be cats, horses, birds or ghosts, despite all abstractions still to be guessed and by Van Vliets picture title completely deprived of a real reference. Paintings are labeled "Wrought Iron Cactus" or with similarly inscrutable titles such as "Circles don't Fly they Float" or "Ghost Lemon".
In Van Vliet's paintings and drawings one senses the music, in the titles the poetry. In painting, the early musician has found an adequate means of expression that provides space for his sheer exuberant and inexhaustible imagination, endures his breaks with tradition, and is able to visualize poetry.
Don Van Vliet lives a secluded life on his farm in California. Nothing seems to be binding for him, neither the time of day, nor the necessity to sleep or to eat a meal. In everything, Van Vliet suspends conventionality by seeming to follow only his own intuition. Perhaps this is why his paintings and drawings seem young, feisty, witty and unabashed. They are without quotations from other artists, there is no adoption of foreign styles, even no associations with images of other artists - but Don Van Vliet:
"There's so many things
to feel and see while you're awake
they're just out of reach
out of gasp ...."
The things that do not seem touchable and unattainable, he just paints them - just like that.
Among other things, the New York catalog "Don Van Vliet" is available for the Cologne exhibition.
This fall, an exhibition tour of paintings and drawings by Don Van Vliet will begin at the Kunstverein Bielefeld (11/27/93 - 1/16/94) and will be shown at several European venues.