- 21 January to 3 May 2019
- 10:00 – 5:00 pm
- Drawing Room, Paul Mellon Centre
Secondhand Daylight has been designed by Turner Prize nominee artist George Shaw to complement the exhibition George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field (Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, October – December 2018; Holburne Museum, Bath, February – May 2019).
Shaw’s paintings focus upon the environment in which he grew up, the Tile Hill council estate near Coventry. They offer a subtle chronicle of his own childhood, and of the estate’s history over more than four decades. His drawings, in turn, explore the individuals, myths, fantasies and horror-stories that populated Shaw’s teenage imagination, and that informed his experience of day-to-day life in the England of the 1970s and 1980s.
Secondhand Daylight gathers together some of the cultural materials that shaped Shaw’s adolescence, and that have informed his later practice as an artist. Bursting with books, records and badges, and featuring an iconic t-shirt, it is also intended to offer a vivid, highly personal glimpse into the workings of English popular culture, of a particular historical period.
“The title of this display comes from the 1979 album by the post-punk band Magazine. I would have come across its post-punk pretentiousness a good few years later, when I became pretentious myself. The album was Bowie on a budget. But, like a lot of the things I picked up on in record shops and bookshops, it was the title and the imagery that held me. What was this second-hand daylight? The album had no single track listed as such. And yet this seeming familiar term described the very substance that enabled me to see the world.” – George Shaw