Bob Dylan: Point Blank
9th May, 2025 – 6th July, 2025
Halcyon
148 New Bond Street
London
W1S 2TR
Bob Dylan’s Return to Painting with 97 Intimate Works That Blur the Line Between Observation and Imagination
On 9 May, Halcyon will open Point Blank, a new exhibition of paintings by Bob Dylan, marking his return to the visual arts with a collection of 97 works on paper. This body of work, largely created between 2021 and 2022, offers a glimpse into Dylan’s private world and a continuation of a lifelong practice that runs parallel to his music.
The exhibition builds upon Dylan’s earlier visual work, including The Drawn Blank Series, where he first developed the method of turning quick sketches into richly layered paintings. In Point Blank, his latest paintings originate from observational drawings — small studies of figures, objects, and moments — which he has elaborated with sweeping brushwork and vivid colour.
Image courtesy of Halcyon
Dylan’s subject matter remains broad and quietly evocative: a mirror reflecting lips, a solitary cowboy against a sunrise, a musician lost in thought. The scenes suggest narrative without insisting on it. Viewers are drawn into intimate spaces and asked to make their own sense of what is unfolding. These are not grand tableaux, but fragments of lived or imagined life, offered without explanation.
“The idea was not only to observe the human condition,” Dylan writes in a note accompanying the exhibition, “but to throw myself into it with great urgency.” That urgency is felt in the looseness of his line, the boldness of the colour choices, and the unpolished immediacy of the images. The work does not aim for perfection but for presence.
Some pieces are reimagined in single-colour treatments — rendered in blue, red, or neutral tones — shifting the mood of the scenes entirely. These tonal studies deepen the emotional weight of the original drawings and reflect Dylan’s ongoing interest in how colour affects meaning.
Image courtesy of Halcyon
The series also includes accompanying prose, presented in a book that expands on the world suggested by the paintings. These written fragments, more impressionistic than explanatory, echo the loose, intuitive quality of the images themselves.
Dylan has spoken in the past about how drawing offers a form of focus and rest — a quiet practice away from the road and the stage. The work in Point Blank feels shaped by that inward turn. There’s a personal rhythm to these paintings, as if made in the margins of a life spent moving, performing, and observing.
Though Dylan remains best known for his music, this exhibition affirms his long-standing engagement with the visual arts. Point Blank does not ask to be compared to his songs, nor does it attempt to translate them. Instead, it offers another point of entry into the creative mind of a man who continues, in his ninth decade, to work with unflagging intensity.
Bob Dylan: Point Blank opens on the 9th of May, 2025 until the 6th of July, 2025 at Halcyon
©2025 Halcyon
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