Wienholt Projects is pleased to present Listen to the Happys!, a solo exhibition of abstract paintings by British-American artist Russell Young.

The exhibition’s title Listen to the Happys!, taken from a handmade sign found in Laurel Canyon, is a reference not only to the Bay Area punk rock band The Happys but also the Northern Soul music and dance movement of 1970s Northern England, reflecting Young’s upbringing in Yorkshire during this period as well as his eventual emigration to California. During this period in Northern England, Young was heavily involved in the many emerging music and subculture scenes, often stealing cars or stowing away on trains to dance at clubs like The Haçienda or The Wigan Casino, watching bands like Happy Mondays and New Order reckoning with a post-Joy Division world. These pivotal inflection points in culture would leave a lasting impression on Young’s current artistic practice. 

Described as a “voluntary keeper and interpreter of some of the most captivating and subversive images ever recorded,” Young is best known for his silk screen, often diamond-dusted paintings of cultural icons. This body of work being presented represents a previously unexhibited but equally rich aspect of Young’s practice further examining cultural phenomena.

The paintings in this exhibition (each measuring at 96 x 72 inches) were made shortly after Young nearly died from contracting the H1N1 virus and falling into a week-long coma in 2010. What has followed from Young’s illness is an ongoing preoccupation with a central dilemma: the exact edge where boylike fantasy encounters violent truth. In these paintings, some of the first while recovering from his coma, Young pressed canvases down into pools of red shellac, letting the resin slowly drip, smear, and splatter like wounds. Other works during this period would further explore paintings through print-making perspectives by using the canvas itself or screen-printed images as a paintbrush. 

With his use of shellac, a refined resin secreted by female lac insects, as well as his own blood incorporated into the handmade pigments, Young balances the frenetic aspirations of these paintings with bodily trauma and memory. The yellow and red pigments—reminiscent of “a strange skin of the brain,” as curator William Hamilton articulates, and, as Young recalls, of looking up at the lights in the hospital where he awoke from his coma—were meticulously crafted over several months and are reflective of the artist’s principal interest in examining the physical and emotional qualities of color. 

Like the rowdy atmosphere of the movement to which these paintings allude, Listen to the Happys! presents both the promise and ultimate end of the free love era, the counterculture of Young’s youth, and perhaps the American Dream itself.

“I don’t remember making these paintings. They were made after waking up from a coma and having to relearn everything: language, animals, color. I was in a frenzy much like the disco fever of the time. Northern Soul. The Haçienda. The Wigan Casino. Stowaways on trains. Dancing until dawn.” – Russell Young