Chris Orr: I Have a Dream – I Have Many Dreams: The Multitude Diaries

Press Release

Jill George Gallery is delighted to announce the latest exhibition by Chris Orr, who has been showing at the Gallery since its foundation.  This exhibition is timed to coincide with the publication of ‘The Multitude Diaries’ and will present a selection of the images from this book, which is published by the Royal Academy/Thames & Hudson. 

All artists keep notebooks of ideas and sketches for their work which serve as raw material for completed paintings, drawings and sculptures.  Many of the images remain as initial sketches and many are worked up into more ‘finished’ states.  Over their working lives, artists produce archives of these drawings – Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’, his constantly evolving repository of source material and working drawings, is a famous example.  For ‘The Multitude Diaries’ Chris Orr has taken pages from his notebooks and published them in a luxuriously coloured book as a graphic novel.  Characters, settings and ideas from his fertile imagination trip over the pages at random as if illustrating a vast, chaotic and hopelessly unstructured urban story with a cast of thousands.

Alongside this publication, the artist will be presenting a selection of the original pages as an installation at the Gallery.  Multiple pages will be hung over one wall, giving viewers a glimpse of the teeming, pulsating richness of the artist’s work. Drawings will spill out in a vast circus of images alive with Chris Orr’s trademark humour.  A huge and colourful array of figures, scenes and cartoons will animate the gallery, as if transforming it from an exhibition space into a giant page torn from the artist’s notebook.

This vibrant installation will reflect the quality for minute and hilarious observation that has long marked Chris Orr’s work, as well as the impossibly crowded yet intimately detailed architectural landscapes that were shown in his last exhibition at Jill George: ‘Cities of Holy Dreams’.  It will be the first time that his drawings have been installed as one large grid, creating a single installation from multiple images that is huge yet intimate, drawing the viewer across, over and ultimately into the myriad dreams of the artist.