You can’t miss Billy Childish. When the artist and musician entered the Lehmann Maupin Gallery before our interview, all eyes turned toward the man elaborately dressed in what appeared to be a safari uniform, his grin revealing a gold tooth buried in his mouth. A true performer, he regalled us as the camera began to roll with a story about once opening for a band at Radio City Music Hall, where, after angering the theater’s union employees, he was banned from the venue and not allowed to attend the after-party. Mischief, it seems, is not a problem for Childish. Rather, it’s a major part of his artistic practice.Among his long recording and writing career — somewhere near 125 albums and 45 books — Childish has established himself as a painter of some renown, evident in his latest show at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in Manhattan: “flowers, nudes and birch trees: New Paintings 2015,” plainly titled, is just that. Much of the work is large-scale and autobiographical, including revealing nudes of his wife (along with a few equally revealing self-portraits) and images of the forest and flowers that speak less to the pastoral imagination than a darker, more sinister view of what rests beyond the trees.
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