On my way to Handel Street Projects, the bus passed Abbey Road. There were about two dozen tourists by the iconic crossing, staging photographs and re-enactments. A negotiation between drivers and pedestrians takes place all day here. It’s a scene of celebration of visual culture, which set the tone for me as I travelled to The Matthew Collings Holistic Art Experience, due to open that evening (on a visit I made on September 19). Having ascertained I wasn’t from the Telegraph or the Mail, the curator, Fedja Klikovac, and eponymous artist, Collings, were generous enough to make a little time for me to poke around a few hours before the PV.
At the Marylebone gallery, I was led up an innocuous flight of stairs into a large gallery with four grey walls on which imagination and memory bring alive some 300 iconic scenes, with a cast of pop cultural figures, art historical figures and political actors posed for dreamlike snapshots from the pencil of Matthew Collings. These images fill the space, and look for any period of time and you will even see a Beatle or two. There are more characters than the cover of Sgt Pepper and the theatricality is just as vivid. Pop colours abound, but political messages, rather than cryptic ones are as black and white as they need to be in our times.
The artist sat in one corner of the room, writing lengthy expository captions directly on the gallery wall. Collings was happy to break soon and to chat with me about all of this. I had never met him, but he was little different from his online self-presentation. Spectacle frames heavy enough to be serious when paired with Karl Marx-like beard. And, in a recent unfortunate development, a patch on one eye to combat the discomfort of Bell’s palsy. The artist was as welcoming as you hope him to be; not only does he keep some rarified imaginative company – with some very great artists and some very evil world leaders – he has a common touch.
Let me just expand. There is a genocide in Gaza. There are fascists controlling the narratives on race in the UK. Trump is as mad as he is stupid. Contemporary artists are silent on issues which might hurt their careers. As a result there is no mainstream visibility for the ammoral billionaires and their hired friends in UK and American politics. In art we struggle with an absence of any cri-de-coeur masterpieces; there is no Picasso, Goya or Velasquez equal to the task of protest. The spirit of Philip Guston, who Collings tells me was perhaps our last great artistic social critic, has been confined by celebratory curators and museum people to the 20th century, with no notion of a KKK at work in America today.
Collings is obsessed with the art world and manages to be an outsider and an insider at the same time. In past decades he edited an art magazine, presented art television, made abstract paintings with his partner Emma Biggs (which he might still be doing). When I ask about such entanglement with what he decries as a right-wing capitalist racket, he compares art world people to family, because you can’t choose them, and you might hate them, but you are part of them.
With an ease of creating likenesses, a surreal gift for unlikely encounters, a sense of urgency that never lacks a sense of humour, Collings depicts an imaginary dynamics by which the famous dead, living celebs from art, music & literature, plus fiend-like political figures battle it out. The artist has described the exhibition as a portrayal of the content of his head, no more, no less. But if so, it is a landscape that feels both funny and familiar, not least because so many of these drawings have previously appeared on Instagram.
But if I was expecting to get a sense of déjà vu from this exhibition, that was confounded. because each drawing here looks more richly and artfully executed in real life and the effect of hundreds of these across the entire gallery space is really overwhelming. I stepped into the space and uttered a word I had not anticipated from a crop of IG posts, “Wow!”
I noted in the visitor book that Collings really has art world ‘surrounded’. I was not 100 percent sure who it was who ever was said to have said that they had America ‘surrounded’. Help me out in the comments if you know. But for me the phrase is a mad, ominous, messianic promise. Was it Timothy Leary or one of the Zippies? Either way it is an episode from twentieth century history of the ilk to be found in these historical drawings. These trenchant works, in this 360 degree space, have the capacity to turn heads and, I hope, change minds.
The Matthew Collings Holistic Art Experience can be experienced at Handel Street Projects, London, until 24 October 2025.