PRESENTATION: Billy Childish-Keep Mojave Weird
Billy Childish is a British artist, writer, and musician. He is known for his Expressionist paintings which resemble the work of both Edvard Munch and Peter Doig. Childish co-founded the Stuckism art movement along with Charles Thomson in 1999, which promoted the use of Modernist pictorial ideals and personal expression over Postmodernist cynicism. Although Childish avoided the pitfalls of conceptualism, his return to figuration and expressive painting is reminiscent of artists who criticize the insulated art world through irony and satire, including Mike Kelley and Douglas Gordon.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive
In Billy Childish’s newest series, which encompasses both landscape and portrait paintings, Childish depicts the western United States in scenes from California—from the Mojave Desert and Joshua Tree to lush Lake Tahoe. The exhibition “keep mojave weird” closely follows Childish’s recent exhibition “Billy Childish: the becoming unbecoming” at Yi Space in Hangzhou, China, which closed in late 2025. During the opening reception in New York, Childish will stage a reading from his latest collection of selected poetry, The Uncorrected Billy Childish (only poets piss in sinks),
Based in Kent, England, Childish’s artistic practice is wide ranging and prolific. In addition to painting, the artist moves seamlessly between poetry and prose, punk rock, blues, and folk music, photography, multiples, and printmaking. Over the course of his decades-long career, he has published 5 novels and more than 40 volumes of confessional poetry, as well as recorded over 170 LPs. Childish’s oil paintings are highly recognizable and often characterized by their striking immediacy. The artist begins each work by sketching the underlying composition in charcoal before moving into his signature range of vibrant and earth-toned oil palettes. His subjects are frequently drawn from his immediate environment—the North Kent landscape, members of his family—but can also derive from further afield, drawing on personal, philosophical, and spiritual concerns, including scenes from the Austrian Alps, the Pacific Northwest, or historical photographs. Seen through Childish’s lens, these subjects are rendered at their most essential, appearing timeless and permanent.
“keep mojave weird” features a new series of paintings inspired by a road trip the artist took with his family during the summer of 2025. This body of work focuses on imagery from California, particularly the landscapes of the Mojave Desert, Joshua Tree, and Lake Tahoe. The expansive subject matter gives Childish room to work on a grand scale, showcasing his particular talent for creating sublime cohesion within each composition. Throughout the exhibition, he compresses large swaths of the Sierra Nevada mountain range onto a single canvas, while images from Joshua Tree of massive rock formations and bare expanses of desert are contained in one or two panels. Rendered on an even smaller scale, “mono lake (version)” (2025) portrays the titular lake in Mono County, CA. The lake is a saline soda lake with exceptionally alkaline water—formed at least 760,000 years ago, its high pH, hypersalinity, and mineral content creates a unique ecosystem and large, otherworldly rock formations. Childish’s depiction distills this unusual environment, evoking an ancient landscape nestled beneath a ring of mountains.
A selection of portraits permeate the show, including images of the artist himself and his children and wife in various Californian settings. These works recall family photos taken on a road trip, and each composition functions as both personal documentation of the family’s journey and a timeless portrait of figures and landscape. In “beneath trees, yuba river” (2024), Childish’s children stare out from under reaching tree branches. At once loose and precise, the work captures the figures at the river’s edge, momentarily frozen amidst the ceaseless flow of the natural world rushing around them.
The works in “keep mojave weird” occupy a space that is both contemporary and eternal, where each landscape feels familiar yet remote. As a whole, the exhibition presents Childish’s vision of a journey across the American West. From soaring mountain ranges, to arid desert, to verdant lakes, each image offers a narrative vignette that feels at once personal and universal.
Photo: Billy Childish, lake beneath mountains, 2025, Oil and charcoal on linen, 72 x 107 7/8 inches, 183 x 274 cm, © Billy Childish, Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin
Info: Lehmann Maupin, 501 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 8/1-28/2/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com/
