- Venue
- The Cluny
- Starts
- Friday, April 5, 2019
- Ends
- Monday, May 27, 2019
- Address
- 36 Lime St, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 2PQ
- Location
- North East England
- Organiser
- The Cluny
Over the last fifteen years or so, satirical artist Darren Cullen has (among many other things) outraged the good people of Glasgow with an enormous billboard bearing the legend ‘SANTA GIVES MORE TO RICH KIDS THAN POOR KIDS’, attracted the attention of Shell’s lawyers after bastardising their logo for his own (green activist-funding) ‘Hell’ brand of t-shirts, produced a realistically horrible ‘fun/fear-sized’ miniature version of the Daily Mail and opened a high street money lenders which offered children high-interest loans against their pocket money using their toys as collateral. (Only 5,000% APR, kids, which is still cheaper than Wonga…)
Cullen initially studied advertising but switched to Fine Art after he had something of an epiphany early on in his course, when he realised that he was studying to become part of a machine that he didn’t like at all. As he noted a few years later in an artwork, “Advertising takes a mother’s love for her child and uses it to sell bleach.”
And now he’s bringing up a collection of the best of his razor-sharp satirical artworks from the last decade and a half to the Cluny and Cluny2 in Newcastle from early April until late May.
The show is curated by Newcastle band JaZZ RiOT’s rhyming gobshite-in-chief Ettrick Scott, a longstanding admirer of Cullen’s provocative and hilarious work:“Darren’s my favourite living artist and I’m really excited about bringing this collection to Newcastle. I can see strong parallels between what he does with paint and what we’re trying to do in JaZZ RiOT. To quote Oscar Wilde, “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you….”
Darren Cullen’s work will be gracing walls in both the Cluny and Cluny2 from Friday April 5th-Monday 27th May during normal opening hours.
Preview Thursday April 4th, 6pm with live performance by JaZZ RiOT.
A vast selection of Darren Cullen’s work can be found at www.spellingmistakescostlives.com
