Wednesday, 2 November 2011

Nightlife Enigmas

The Museum of Club Culture presents the first in the series of Artist in Residence projects titled
“Nightlife Enigmas” by Mark Wigan from 19th November - 18th December

Mark Wigan will be drawing in The Museum of Club Culture in the weeks leading up to Christmas.
Working on large sheets of paper, he will be creating a series of works called Nightlife Enigmas which will feature painstaking, highly detailed pen and ink drawings of subcultures, nightclub tribes and snatches of babble and chat. You are welcome to visit the museum and see the work as it unfolds.
There will also be an exhibition of the completed works in January 2012

The Museum of Club Culture is open to the public at weekends from 11am – 4.30pm Saturdays and Sundays



A prolific graphic artist Wigan's illustrations have chronicled and celebrated club culture. He is the ultimate night club artist. As The Independent put it
'He paints pictures of nightclubs and night-club people and is commissioned to decorate night-clubs with similar scenes. He also runs nightclubs and likes to relax in .....night-clubs'
The NME stated 'Paris had Toulouse Lautrec. London's got WIGAN. Thats the nom de nib of Mr Mark Williams an artist whose poser packed drawingsimmortalise the murky menagerie of late night London hipsterdom'.

If a picture tells a thousand words, Wigan's drawings are worth an entire library of professorial works on Pop Culture. His approach to graphic art is progressive, multi-medial and interdisciplinary and his output includes regular international gallery exhibitions, performances, music graphics for the likes of Working Week,A Guy called Gerald and Frankie Bones, music video animations to T-Shirts, skateboards,self- published books of drawings and screenprints, customised racing bikes, textile designs, theatre design, set design for TV companies, flyer designs, neon sculptures and night-club murals in London,Tokyo and New York.
The Face magazine commented that Wigan was the long time Michelangelo to London's clubland demi-monde and his work 'revitalises more stoicforms of social realism with a neon bright parade of semi fictitiouscult classics, snap, crackle and popping their way through the heated hordes of clubland'
Alix Sharkey, writing in The Independent, stated 'Some of the early works from the London Subterraneans series, for example are now revealed asastonishingly accurate maps, showing the development of the attitudes, hairstyles, clothing and interests that defined asubculture. If a picture tells a thousand words, Wigan's drawings are worth an entire library of professorial works on pop culture'.

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