Raynes E. Birkbeck:
DINOLAND –
IT’S NICER THERE
Artist Raynes E. Birkbeck creates fantastical, vibrant paintings that imagine a better world, one in which humans coexist with dinosaurs to retell stories of past, present and future.
Raynes E. Birkbeck is something of a unicorn artist, in that he is largely self-taught. In a sea of cool art world graduates, the 65-year-old artist, a lifelong New Yorker, is a product of the school of life, for want of a better cliché. His work manifests as a riot of ideas and philosophies melded with histories, both personal and collective. This has invariably set him in the ‘outsider artist’ camp for an art world unable to place an artist who works independent of the traditional system. Yet as the canon of art history collapses to include the wider diaspora, the outside is increasingly finding itself at the centre. Working from his imagination, Birkbeck melds key historical figures from African American history – the Black Panthers for example – with Egyptian gods, the pyramids and strong ancient African civilisations, as well
as American historical figures such
as George S. Patton or J. Edgar
Hoover, depicted in fantastical sci-fi alternate realities.
His paintings deal too with queer representation, environmental issues, war, politics and sex, all the hot button contemporary issues, but not in the way you might expect. Birkbeck has developed an authentic visual language that is uniquely his own, naïvely ebullient,
urgent and richly complex. Everything seems to occur on a concurrent timeline.
His most recent exhibition, The World View Show (2020), his first with Nino Mier Gallery, imagined a sci-fi paradise where humanity is polyamorous, omnisexual and multigendered.
Sounds like heaven, right?
The accompanying works – oil paintings, drawings and a ceramic sculpture – formed The Dinoland Series. Here’s where it gets interesting. Dinoland imagines, sometime in the . .. Subscribe to read this article in full
