The Rolling Stones Play Hard In Incendiary Rock And Roll Exhibition Featuring Rare Paintings, Photographs, And Memorabilia

Faithful fans of The Rolling Stones and Jeff Koons enthusiasts will recall with delight the 2002-2003 Licks Tour, with the American artist’s logo artwork sprawling across the stadium show backdrop, a ferocious collision of fine art and rock royalty.

Koons’ Rolling Stones Licks World Tour 2002/2003 (2004), one of 250 digital prints on paper that were signed by the artist and all four members of the band from an edition of 1,000, is on view at Chase Contemporary in New York’s Chelsea art district for a rollicking exhibition, Rock & Roll Painting, Photography, & Memorabilia, through January 10, 2021.

The exhibition explores the visual identity of rock and roll, with a heavy focus on the self-described leading band of the musical genre, the Stones. Jaw-dropping vintage posters, colorful art, and rare memorabilia spanning the 1960s through the 2000s, salute the history of rock and roll while touring the progression of design and art as it pertains to music.

A Tumblin’ Dice ESP guitar, hand embellished by Stones’ guitarist Ronnie Wood, is on display alongside his rapturous paintings, including Blues Man (2012), a mixed media work created for BluesFest in London and Manchester, England, that year. A former art student, Wood told me in a May email interview that his passion for and expression of music and visual art are inseparable. “There has always been a connection between art and music,” he said, describing works he created during quarantine.

A wide array of vintage posters for sale includes the Rolling Stones Ladies & Gentlemen Film Poster (1974), commemorating two Stones concerts shot during the band’s 1972 North American tour, and a variety of sultry promotional images for Some Girls, the English band’s 14th British and 16th American studio album. The first record to feature Wood as a full-time member, it emerged as the band’s top-selling album in the United States, certified by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for selling six million copies by 2000. A critical triumph, it was the only Stones album nominated for a Grammy Award in the Album of the Year category.

The ultra-rare Some Girls Vintage Album Promotional Poster (Donut) (1978) is especially swoon worthy.

Fine art and music converge in Bernie Taupin’s American Burka (2004), a wrapped fabric, twine, wire, barbed wire, lock on mannequin. Best known for his long-term collaboration with Elton John, Taupin attributes his passion for visual art to his mother, Daphne. He started displaying and selling his massive, mixed media, contemporary assemblages, at art fairs and galleries throughout the United States and Canada in 2010.

On view and for sale for the first time are lyrics and notes by the Stones, along with rare 1972 photographs of the band by Peter Beard, who was commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine to document the Exile on Main Street tour.

Beatles enthusiasts will share words of love for a series of 14 colored drawings created for the Fab Four’s first music video in 1966. Pop up your quiver with a surfboard painted and signed by Paul McCartney for a charity auction that benefited Surfers Against Sewage in 2008.

Punk rockers, raise a fist for a 1984 painting used for the Ramones final album cover created by Mark Kostabi, a Los Angles-born artist of Estonian descent who rose to fame in the East Village art scene.

In collaboration with the exhibition, indulge your senses with a livestream concert by New York City-based singer-songwriter Elizabeth Wyld tonight at 5 p.m. ET on the gallery’s Instagram @chasecontemporary. Wyld’s debut album Quiet Year, produced by Zach Jones and Oscar Albis Rodriguez of New York-based musical duo A Great Big World, showcases her trembling vocals ranging from enticing murmurs to emotional bursts to convey unfeigned lyrics.

Most items in the show hail from the personal collection of Bernie Chase, owner and founder of Chase Contemporary, said gallery director Isabel Sullivan. Chase, founder of the Symbolic Collection, hosted Ronnie Wood: A Major Retrospective of 50 Years of Rock and Roll, presenting many of the same pieces for sale now, at his former London gallery in 2012.

Source: Forbes – Business