Yeadon at 70: What’s the Meaning of This?

What’s the Meaning of This?

John Yeadon at 70

This exhibition was a selective retrospective view of paintings produced in the 1980s alongside Yeadon’s more recent work, held at the Newsroom Gallery at the old Coventry Evening Telegraph building in Coventry 18th May – June 15th 2018.

 

 

 

“John Yeadon looks back to his 1984 Dirty Tricks exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry and compares this work with his recent paintings.

Thirty-four years ago this controversial exhibition of Yeadon’s Grotesque Realist, large allegorical ‘history paintings’ was received with alarm and pleasure. At the high point of AIDS paranoia and gay ‘blame’, Yeadon’s forthright, radical, critical, ‘in your face’ paintings challenged preconceptions on sexuality and society. These paradoxes disturbed and offended some Tory councillors.

The Coventry Evening Telegraph declared that it was ‘Smut Not Art’ in a homophobic editorial rant. However, the exhibition increased the attendance at the Herbert by 40%. Works from this exhibition were later that year exhibited at the Pentonville Gallery in London and the British Art Show of 1985. The Arts Council of Britain also bought a version of ‘The Last Chilean Supper’ – which was one of the ‘lavatory wall smut’ paintings so derided in the Coventry Evening Telegraph – and John Yeadon was featured by Emmanuel Cooper in his book the Sexual Perspective/Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, published in 1986.

This exhibition not only compares Yeadon’s paintings of the 1980s with his recent work but asks the viewer to reflect on the political, ideological, social and economic changes which have taken place in this period. These past struggles and contradictions of the 80s that generated Yeadon’s work might also be relevant today.

Have things changed, is society more tolerant, more open minded, more liberal today? As Coventry approaches the City of Culture, is the city more enlightened, less provincial?“

 

Over 1,000 visitors came to this exhibition many from outside Coventry: Devon, Suffolk, Bristol, Cheltenham, London Birmingham, Loughborough, Derbyshire, Liverpool York, Newcastle and Cumbria.

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John’s old friend Kev Hopper shot the opening sequence of this interesting video at the preview of the show on Thursday 17th May 2018; the day after, he invites Yeadon to talk about the work. Essential viewing. Click on image to proceed.

 

See the exhibition here:    GALLERY 1   GALLERY 2  GALLERY 3  GALLERY 4

 

Read an article by former CET journalist Julie Chamberlain, published in the Morning Star, here

 

This is the second of three ‘retrospective’ exhibitions John Yeadon is having during the next 12 months.

Three Witches, Feb – April 2018 The National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes.

What’s the Meaning of This, Yeadon at 70. May – June 2018. Newsroom Gallery, CET Building, Coventry.

Fearful Symmetry Incorporating, Unbelievable Stories and the ventriloquist dummies. January 2019. Lanchester Research Gallery, Coventry University.