The singer Ed Sheeran has topped the charts along with his singles and offered out stadiums internationally, and now he seems to broaden his output to incorporate artworks that look suspiciously like Jackson Pollock‘s drip work.
Sheeran is now displaying his all-over abstractions at Heni Gallery in London, whose exhibition of them opens this Friday. They’re formally titled the “Cosmic Carpark Work,” and Sheeran’s basis can also be promoting prints of them for £900 ($1,200) every—round $61.1 million lower than the costliest Pollock canvas ever offered at public sale.
Fifty p.c of the gross sales of these works will profit colleges throughout the UK, a trigger that Sheeran has beforehand championed, saying that instructional initiatives are systemically underfunded.
He instructed the Guardian this week that he had making artwork for years, however his observe was solely kickstarted throughout the previous decade. “I used to be forwards and backwards on tour final yr, and I used a variety of my downtime within the UK to color,” he mentioned. “I’d run to a disused automotive park in Soho every morning, paint, then run house and I’d do this each day till I headed again out on tour once more.”
The work bear greater than a passing resemblance to Pollock’s artwork. Most are composed of tangles of paint in varied colours, and Sheeran made them by waving round a moist brush above a canvas positioned on the ground—simply as Pollock himself as soon as did.
The Guardian article even consists of a picture of Sheeran in coveralls tossing crimson paint onto one in every of his canvases. The {photograph} appears to deliberately recall Hans Namuth’s famed photos and movies of Pollock at work.
However whereas Pollock’s works have been supposed as formal experiments, along with his uncommon course of meant to distance his hand from his canvas, Sheeran’s don’t appear fairly so heady. A Heni launch informs viewers that Sheeran’s work are “impressed by celestial patterns,” and that these new works are “in-keeping along with his well-documented, expressionist splash portray type.”
That launch notably doesn’t point out Pollock. Lavender Mist or Autumn Rhythm, the “Cosmic Carpark Work” are apparently not. One doubts that Clement Greenberg, presumably the best critic ever to take up Pollock’s work, would have a lot to say about Sheeran’s work have been he nonetheless alive.
At the very least one high-profile critic has already eviscerated the Sheeran work. “Sheeran’s artwork is a slick con job,” wrote Jonathan Jones within the Guardian. “In portray his mild, meaningless summary concoctions, he avoids correct scrutiny and dips a toe into artwork with out placing himself on the road. What a professional, even when he’s an newbie.”
