Street artist Phlegm’s first indoor exhibition at Shoreditch gallery
Phlegm: simply The Bestiary
Most artists can’t help being anonymous, but for the muralist and street artist Phlegm it’s part of his enigma. “I draw comics/zines, and I spray paints on walls. Simple,” he writes on his Facebook page.
Considering that Phlegm is a world renowned muralist, his vast works on public display internationally from Warsaw to Kentucky, this smacks of modesty. Phlegm’s first indoor exhibition The Bestiary at the Howard Griffin Gallery this month is unlikely to quell interest in a man who built his reputation painting on factory walls in Rotherham and Sheffield.
Painted in Phlegm’s trademark monochrome, horned beasts, snakes and other macabre forms, all preserved in jars, greet visitors on entering the exhibition space. Phlegm’s bestiary is a visual equivalent of collections of medieval stories featuring real or imagined animals alongside descriptions of their moral significance.
In the main exhibition space natural history collides with fantastical stick-like creatures with bug eyes. A troubled taxonomy is at play, with certain species using nets and traps to catch the others.
Phlegm is used to painting gigantic murals; in the gallery there are more obvious height restrictions. But rather than deliberately scaling down his work he engages with the space by painting some of the larger characters in cramped, foetal positions.
Cave painting couldn’t be further from the typical Shoreditch gallery experience, but Phlegm’s tapestry of half-woodland creatures, impossible machines and objects certainly owes something to this ‘primitive’ art form.
Viewers will struggle to decipher the meaning of the networks of levers, pulleys and cogs and to make connections between Phlegm’s creepy alternative civilisation and this one. Is it allegorical, or has Phlegm been reading too much Terry Pratchett?
Either way, this is a unique opportunity to see one-off work (it’s all going to be destroyed when the exhibition ends) from a top street artist. Phlegm may not give interviews, but his art speaks for itself.
The Bestiary is at The Howard Griffin Gallery, 189 Shoreditch High Street, E1 6HU until 4 March.