Friday 17 March 2017

Lilias Buchanan: upcoming solo exhibition at Shapero Modern


Artist and musician Lilias Buchanan (DY 2014) is exhibiting new works directly inspired by Richard Brautigan’s 1976 cult classic, Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel. 


29 March — 11 April 2017 
Private View: Tuesday 28 March, 6.30 — 8.30pm
Please RSVP: modern@shapero.com
The assembled works, nine small-scale paintings exquisitely rendered in pencil, watercolour and collage, channel the book’s two parallel narrative threads. The first focuses on a heartbroken American writer who has recently been left by his Japanese lover. His obsessive thoughts about her prevent him from concentrating on a story he is writing, in which a sombrero falls from the sky in a sleepy town in the American southwest. Eventually, and despairingly, the author throws what he has written into the wastepaper basket, but the discarded story continues to write itself, so beginning the second narrative, which recounts a bizarre tale in which the sombrero becomes an object of fascination, attracting enormous crowds and fierce debate before ultimately provoking a civil war. Lilias admits that 'the creation of this body of work and her interest in Brautigan’s novel has bordered on the obsessional', leading her to approach strangers in the street who bore a resemblance to Brautigan’s characters, and asking them to pose for her. Read more about the project here.

You can see some of the works in the exhibition below: