Who is Johnny One Bollock?
Is he a reject from the Punk era or a visionary of the future world of art.
Originally a set and stage designer back in the seventies, working for groups like Siouxsie And The Banshees, The Sex Pistols, Ramones and The Clash, he then moved into the smaller medium of art. A musician, producer, actor and artist Johnny throws his talents in an agressive vibrant way in whatever project he is working on.
As a artist, Johnny creates large mixed media pieces that are very much a product of his varied training and experience. His style combines bold, dynamic colors and strokes with painstaking layouts and typographical elements. The result is the unique blend of a painter's passion tempered with the calculating compositional eye of a graphic designer. He explores his themes and subject matter primarily through symbols and personalities evoking pride, nostalgia, and hope.
1970s
After an early academic background in classical music and literature, Johnny briefly enrolled as an architectural student. Through out the 1970s he exhibited drawings, altered photographs and conceptual works, mostly in London and Liverpool. It was through a chance meeting that he was asked to design a stage set for the (unknown at the time) group Siouxsie And The Banshees. During the punk era it was commonplace for the bands to destroy the sets they were playing on and through this Johnny found that his style became bold and fast.
1980s
In 1981, he settled temporarily in New York City to study and further his career within the US art circles. During the decade of the 1980s Johnny was featured in shows at numerous international venues including the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1983; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1984 ; the Nationale galerie, Berlin, 1984; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985 ; the Art Institute of Chicago, 1987 ; the Fundacion Caja, 1987; and the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, 1988. On top of this he was also well sort after as a set designer for certain tours at the time, including major tours on the east coat of the USA and Japan.
1990s
Through the 1990s, surveys of Johnny's work were exhibited by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Royal Academy of Arts, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Sezon Museum, Tokyo. He also ventured back into set design and designed numerous sets for many music videos, most of which can still be viewed today.
2000 and after
In 1999/2000, Johnny returned to his hometown of Camden in London. After a 20 year sabattical he is now home and concentrating on art rather than music. His style is still bold, fast, and aggressive and the same can be said about him. In 2005 Johnny was arrested for allegdly attacking a young gallery owner who criticised his work, all charges were dropped, but that exhibition did come to an abrupt end. |
