Bob Dylan|The Brazil Series (2015)

'The Brazil Series' marks Dylan's move from watercolour and gouache on paper to acrylic on canvas, and it took his painting into Denmark's national gallery.

From Copenhagen to print

Statens Museum for Kunst, the National Gallery of Denmark, approached Dylan in 2008 after seeing the catalogue of his first museum show of watercolours in Germany. The result was 40 previously unseen acrylic paintings, made for the museum and shown there from September 2010 to January 2011. Dylan gave a typically short reason for the subject: "I chose Brazil as a subject, because I have been there many times and I like the atmosphere." The museum's director saw the roots of both the Brazil paintings and the earlier watercolours in Matisse, whose work is a strength of the Copenhagen collection.

The scenes are of slums, ranches and the coast, painted in earthy browns and ochres with tonal greens and blues. They are often read as an unromantic view of the country that touches on poverty and inequality without making a statement of it.

The two releases

Five years after the exhibition, the paintings came to print. The first three images, 'Favela Villa Broncos', 'Ranchers' and 'Boxing Gym', were released in May 2015 and sold out within months. A second group of three, 'Favela Villa Candido', 'Grande Árvore Beachfront' and 'Wagon Master', followed in October 2015, launched in London during Dylan's run of concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. The handling of these later images has been compared to Cézanne, one of Dylan's major influences, and the composition of 'Grande Árvore Beachfront' is often seen as echoing Cézanne's 'The Card Players'.

The Copenhagen exhibition hung the new acrylics alongside paintings from 'The Drawn Blank Series', the watercolour and gouache work that came before them, so the step from one medium to the other could be seen in a single show.