Charlie Billingham’s Bum 2 and Bum 3, 2012, encapsulate the artist’s tongue-in-cheek renditions of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century satirical prints by Regency caricaturists such as George Cruikshank, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. By homing in on seemingly arbitrary details – wigs and breeches, bonnets with cascading feathers, big-buttoned waistcoats and, one of the artist’s favourite motifs, large buttocks – Billingham humorously produces satires of satire as he transforms prints originally intended for mass-reproduction into large-scale paintings. The resulting works, rendered in vibrantly coloured palettes, depict gloriously uncontextualised scenarios of vaguely scatological subjects. Executed in broad swathes of paint in block colours, the paintings seem to verge at times on abstraction. Their fragmentary presentations suggest a kind of dispersal which refuses to fully cohere. In exploring changing tastes, aesthetics and fashions throughout history, Billingham engages with the past to reveal the idiosyncrasies of the present. ‘My work is of course contemporary,’ he has written, ‘and is concerned above all with current issues and conversations around painting. I use the historic imagery as a tool to do this.’
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