Dexter Dalwood: ‘If we want art history to change, we need to include artists in creating shows’ – The Art Newspaper

23 May 2025

Well-known historical works by artists like George Stubbs and Thomas Gainsborough, as well as famous and sometimes tragic events of the past, get a new twist in the work of the British artist Dexter Dalwood. His fascination with past events and with the development of art history are combined in his most recent paintings. These works, such as Bloody Sunday (2023) and The Blitz (2024), combine images and numbers on canvas to recall famous historical events in new ways.

Dalwood’s first artistic enterprise was as the bass player in a punk rock band, The Cortinas. His breakthrough moment as a visual artist came in the late 1990s when he was shown at the Saatchi Gallery, and he is still best known for works from that period, especially his fictional interiors such as Kurt Cobain’s Greenhouse (2000), Wittgenstein’s Bathroom (2001) and Jackie’s Cabin on the Christina O (2000).

In 2017 he undertook a residency in Mexico and moved there five years later. This, and his long association with the National Gallery in London, where he was an artist trustee for eight years, is the backdrop to his latest, and perhaps unexpected, role as co-curator of José María Velasco: A View of Mexico. The show runs until 17 August and includes sweeping, detailed paintings of a then-rural landscape that today is the setting for the world’s fifth biggest urban conurbation, Mexico City.

The Art Newspaper: In your show at London’s Lisson Gallery last year you explored the work of artists from Stubbs and Gainsborough to Ben Nicholson. The exhibition you are currently involved in centres on an obscure 19th-century Mexican artist, José María Velasco. That is quite a pivot—how did it come about?

Dexter Dalwood: Velasco is hardly known outside Mexico—even some eminent art historians in Europe have never heard of him—but when I saw his work for the first time, I could see he’s got a very different idea of what painting is about, and he’s an artist with a great deal to say in 2025. Velasco was painting in Mexico around the same time as Paul Cézanne was painting in Europe: like him, he painted in plein air and then worked his canvases up in the studio.

Unlike most 19th-century European artists, Velasco wanted to record the advent of industrialisation. He wasn’t interested in people sitting in their gardens or eating lunch, as so many of the Impressionists were; he was interested in recording the beginning of industrialisation, the arrival of train lines and factories, in Mexico City. He captured it at the moment of change, and he wants the viewer to think about what this place was like before it was like this—and what it might be like in the future?

Read the full interview with Dexter Dalwood in The Art Newspaper here.

Image: Portrait of Dexter Dalwood, 2022. Photo by John Spinks.