The great American artist Bill Lynch (1960-2013) never had a single exhibition in his lifetime. Almost nothing was written about his wild and beautiful paintings – ancient yet modern, mythological yet supremely contemporary – and they have only gradually started to emerge. Brighton Centre for Contemporary Arts has somehow managed to lay hands on 15 of his elusive works on wood from scattered locations to mount this mesmerising show, the first in a public gallery in the UK. The result is a coup.
Lynch was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the heartlands of Breaking Bad, and studied art at the Cooper Union in New York. He lived in California for a time but ended up in Raleigh, North Carolina, to be close to his family. He seems to have worked intermittently, sometimes as a carpenter, though it is surprisingly hard to discover very much about him.
