Unknown Artist: 'elvis-picasso in bloomsbury'
Graphite, London 1993.

by Mary Ether, London 2000



[These are the notes to the 2000 installation: 'in out up down left right - the personal visions of Elvis-Picasso'.]

Elvis-Picasso was born, it is commonly believed, somewhere in Australia sometime in the last century but was abandoned as a youngster on the steps of the National Gallery where he was found by a house painter who brought him up as her own assistant. Naming him after some habit he had developed as a baby, she sent him to art school where he studied minimalist conceptual drawing and the philosophy of meaninglessness.

Like his best friend, he soon took a creative approach to alcohol and drugs and began to develop his own personal vision and other problems. For a short time he was the country's foremost graffiti artist and having had several brushes with the law was singled out for a bright future. He gained much notoriety and prestige when he became Artist in Residence at Her Majesty's Pentridge Prison. Not known to many of his closest friends, he privately suffered severely from chronic kleptomania and rabid plagiarism; the pain he suffered can be clearly seen in his work from that period. At a critical moment in his career he managed to get out and has never dared looked back.

This, the second, and probably the last, exhibition of his at the Hetley Road Arts Centre comprises a selection of work from his very own personal visual journals. It is the first in this Centre since his celebrated and memorable installation, "The Complete Works of Elvis-Picasso" (1993-94), which drew visitors from many parts of the globe and wide critical acclaim from selected writers. As with that exhibition, this one was curated by his lifelong friend, himself one of his country's extremely interesting artists and critics, who has spent many years of his own wretched life cataloguing and maintaining the vast oeuvre of his most imaginative friend and colleague.

After his last studio exhibition, Elvis left a large number of his private sketchbooks in the studio, these, together with a large number drawings found in the local art school rubbish bins, forms the core of this, his last, exhibition.

A lot of Elvis-Picasso's work deals with popular erotic, violent, obscene, disgusting, sacrilegious and blasphemous subjects and these were exhibited to provide a real eyeful for the cognoscenti, literati, illuminati and visiting art school students! He has always promoted his rich philosophy that art, though a lot of people think it unintelligible, is, in the post-modern sense, intended to be just that.

Elvis, who has not seen his family for many years, has recorded in his journals his deeply felt, warm and sensitive emotions - essentially private and profoundly meaningless. It will be of immense pleasure for visitors to this exhibition, to experience the vast range and intensity of his world, to join with him in his journey to the very edge of the abyss and then burst with joy at the breathtaking richness of his sordid mind that he so eloquently exhibited in this anthology.

His many posh friends, collectors and curators from across the globe, as well as members of the Society of Entropic Surrealists, of which Elvis-Picasso is founder, life fellow and president, will gather at the private view to congratulate him and to celebrate this most gifted contributor to the world of art.



Mary Ether, 2000

Director of the Elvis-Picasso Gallery
Head Curator for the Concile de l'Artes de la Ville de Nulle Part.
Email: director@elvispicasso.com