Located on a street off London’s Park Lane the Michael Werner Gallery is the epitome of moneyed art world chic: situated in a Georgian townhouse, so discreet a passerby would never know it was there. It really shouldn’t be a surprise to find the late Don Van Vliet’s paintings in these surroundings – Michael Werner has been his gallerist ever since the early 80s, when Van Vliet stopped calling himself Captain Beefheart and gave up music entirely to devote himself to visual art – and yet it is. The paintings in his first London exhibition for decades feel somehow at odds with their surroundings.
