The singer Ed Sheeran has topped the charts with his singles and sold out stadiums across the world, and now he looks to expand his output to include artworks that look suspiciously like Jackson Pollock‘s drip paintings.
Sheeran is now showing his all-over abstractions at Heni Gallery in London, whose exhibition of them opens this Friday. They are officially titled the “Cosmic Carpark Paintings,” and Sheeran’s foundation is also selling prints of them for £900 ($1,200) each—around $61.1 million less than the most expensive Pollock canvas ever sold at auction.
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Fifty percent of the sales of those works will benefit schools across the UK, a cause that Sheeran has previously championed, saying that educational initiatives are systemically underfunded.
He told the Guardian this week that he had making art for years, but his practice was only kickstarted during the past decade. “I was back and forth on tour last year, and I used a lot of my downtime in the UK to paint,” he said. “I’d run to a disused car park in Soho each morning, paint, then run home and I’d do that daily until I headed back out on tour again.”
The paintings bear more than a passing resemblance to Pollock’s art. Most are composed of tangles of paint in various colors, and Sheeran made them by waving around a wet brush above a canvas placed on the floor—just as Pollock himself once did.
The Guardian article even includes an image of Sheeran in coveralls tossing red paint onto one of his canvases. The photograph seems to intentionally recall Hans Namuth’s famed pictures and films of Pollock at work.
But whereas Pollock’s works were intended as formal experiments, with his unusual process meant to distance his hand from his canvas, Sheeran’s don’t seem quite so heady. A Heni release informs viewers that Sheeran’s paintings are “inspired by celestial patterns,” and that these new works are “in-keeping with his well-documented, expressionist splash painting style.”
That release notably does not mention Pollock. Lavender Mist or Autumn Rhythm, the “Cosmic Carpark Paintings” are apparently not. One doubts that Clement Greenberg, possibly the greatest critic ever to take up Pollock’s work, would have much to say about Sheeran’s paintings were he still alive.
At least one high-profile critic has already eviscerated the Sheeran paintings. “Sheeran’s art is a slick con job,” wrote Jonathan Jones in the Guardian. “In painting his light, meaningless abstract concoctions, he avoids proper scrutiny and dips a toe into art without putting himself on the line. What a pro, even when he is an amateur.”