Manic Street Preachers bassist Nicky Wire has announced a new art exhibition, My Little Empire, to be displayed in a Welsh museum.
From August 6 until December 13 at Narberth Museum in Pembrokeshire, the exhibition will feature 26 new pieces that showcase Wire’s love of the Polaroid image.
My Little Empire, named after a song from the 1998 album ‘This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours’, will include several self-portraits, as well as subjects including Welsh film actor Richard Burton, Marilyn Monroe, Albert Camus and Jean Paul Basquiat.
The show has been curated by Mark Lewis, who has said (via South Wales Argus): “The exhibition came about after I contacted Nicky to say that one of his pictures was being used in the Dylan Thomas exhibition at Narberth Museum. He said he had always liked Narberth and would love to show his work there. And so, we chatted and arranged it to open between tour dates.”
Wire has exhibited his artwork in the past, with the ‘Paintings and Polaroids’ display at Tenby Museum and Art Gallery in Wales in 2018. Those works were partially taken from his 2011 photography book ‘Death of a Polaroid: A Manics Family Album’, and he told NME about the exhibition at the time.
“The work on display spans over three decades,” he told us. “It’s mixture of polaroids and paintings. There’s a great tradition of bass-playing artists: Kim Gordon, Paul Simonon, Paul McCartney – I thought I’d join that club.”
“It’s a great cleansing exercise, really. Hopefully they’ll all sell, as well. It’s all for sale. I just feel like passing on my obsessions and my love. It feels like the right time.”
“I’m very attached to anything rooted in the past, but as the process started to develop it felt like the right thing to do,” he added. “They look much better as a collection rather than in the corner of my house. There’s everything in there from some small and precious painted polaroids from ‘Rewind The Film’ to some massive doors that I’ve been painting on for 20 years. A lot of it is found materials from skips.”
The new exhibition follows on from a new book of previously unseen Valerie Phillips photographs of the band, titled Little Baby Nothings. Consisting largely of photos from the ‘Generation Terrorists’ era, it was released on June 28 in very limited supply.
The band are also set to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their 1994 album ‘The Holy Bible’ with a one-off screening on August 30 of the concert film BePure-BeVigilant-Behave.
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