群交AV

In the winter of 1961 Dylan moved to New York and began to play in the burgeoning folk music scene of Greenwich Village. That same year he was signed to Columbia Records and released his debut album Bob Dylan in 1962. This was followed by The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) which revealed the voice of a powerful new songwriter in 'Blowin' in the Wind' and 'A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall'. This was followed by Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964), which reflected such diverse influences as the Beat poets, French symbolists, and the Delta blues. In 1965 he released Bringing It All Back Home (1965) which included 'Subterranean Homesick Blues', a song which would give Dylan his first Top 40 hit in the United States. The iconic promotional video for ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, in which Dylan holds up cue cards in front of the camera, is widely considered to be one of the earliest music videos. Bringing It All Back Home was the first of three records that changed the perception of Dylan as a folk and protest artist, and its release shook popular music to its core. Highway 61 Revisited (1965) whose opener, 'Like A Rolling Stone' became a generational anthem, and Blonde on Blonde, (1966), completed the 'electric trilogy'. John Wesley Harding (1967), noted for its sparse arrangements, biblical allusions and concise storytelling, signalled another new direction, while Nashville Skyline (1969) marked Dylan's embrace of country music, yielding the worldwide smash single, 'Lay, Lady, Lay'.

In 1963 Dylan performed during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech. In the same year Dylan sold out New York City's Carnegie Hall. In the space of just two years, Dylan had gone from playing in coffee shops to concert halls across America. In 1965 Dylan headlined at the Newport Folk Festival where his 'plugged in' performance with a rock 'n' roll band stunned the audience and shocked the music world, leading to a combative tour of Europe and Australia in 1966, marked by fans who both booed and cheered Dylan's new sound. Following a motorcycle accident near Woodstock in upstate New York in 1966, Dylan decided to take a break. He would not tour again for eight years.

Dylan’s origins as a visual artist began in the early 1960s. A small number of his early works reached the public gaze through album covers such as The Band’s Music from Big Pink (1968). He received his first set of oil paints as a gift from his wife Sara for his 27^th birthday in May 1968, and Dylan asked his neighbour, the artist Bruce Dorfman, to show him how to use them. According to Dorfman, Dylan first emulated Vermeer, followed by Monet and then Van Gogh, eventually finding Chagall, whose work he had admired during a visit to the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The release of the album New Morning (1970) marked Dylan's return to form. In 1973, he took a small part in Sam Peckinpah's film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid for which he wrote the soundtrack that included the chart-topping song 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door'. That same year, Dylan published Writings and Drawings, a book of his lyrics from 1961-1972, some of which were accompanied by original drawings, marking the first time that he illustrated his songs. In 1974, Dylan reunited with his former backing group, The Band, for a tour of North America, and in 1975 put together The Rolling Thunder Revue, a series of concert featuring friends, poets, filmmakers and playwrights that performed mostly in small theatres across northeastern America.

The mid-late 1970s saw the release of albums Before the Flood (1974), Blood on the Tracks (1975), which topped the charts with songs like 'Tangled Up in Blue' and 'Simple Twist of Fate'; The Basement Tapes (1975); and Desire (1976) which included the song 'Hurricane' and marked Dylan's striking return to topical songwriting. In 1978 he embarked on a worldwide tour that lasted until the end of the year, while simultaneously releasing his eighteenth studio album, Street Legal. The decade closed with Slow Train Coming (1979) which featured music deeply rooted in America's faith-based gospel music tradition, another unexpected turn in the artist's career.

During 1991 Columbia Records released the first three volumes of an ongoing series of archival releases, entitled The Bootleg Series. In 1992, Dylan returned to his folk roots with his first solo acoustic album in 30 years, Good as I Been to You and in 1993 another album of acoustic folk music, World Gone Wrong. Towards the end of the decade Dylan released Time Out of Mind (1997), a critical and commercial success containing 'Make You Feel My Love', which in 1998 received three Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year.

Dylan continued to garner awards throughout the decade. He was appointed Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by Jack Lang, French Minister of Culture in 1990, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding contributions in the field of recorded music in 1991. In 1997, President Clinton presented him with the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to American culture.

Drawn Blank, Dylan's first book of sketches, was published in 1994. Drawn Blank featured rapidly made sketches, created between 1989 and 1992 to ‘relax and refocus a restless mind’.The drawings chronicled an active life on the road – travelling between gigs, on trains, in cafes and backstage. In 1994 Dylan headlined the Woodstock Festival with a set of his iconic songs, followed in 1995 with a performance on the hit television series MTV Unplugged, in which he reimagined many of his classic songs.

In early 2001, Dylan won a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award for Best Original Song in a Motion Picture for 'Things Have Changed', written in 2000 for the film Wonder Boys. Several critically acclaimed album releases followed, including Love and Theft (2001); Modern Times (2006), Dylan's first American number one album in 30 years; Together Through Life (2009), which topped the charts in both the USA and the UK; and Christmas in the Heart, Dylan's first collection of Christmas songs, the royalties of which went to charity.

The 2000s saw Dylan’s creative innovation expand further into film, literature and the visual arts. In 2003 he appeared alongside an all-star cast in Masked and Anonymous, a film he co-wrote with director Larry Charles, and in 2005 he was the subject of a two-part documentary titled No Direction Home, directed by Martin Scorsese, which charts Dylan's early career as a folk musician in New York up to 1966.

This was a pivotal period for Dylan’s visual artwork. His first museum exhibition, The Drawn Blank Series – depicting fleeting images of life on the road in portraits, landmarks, and unknown places – was unveiled in 2007 at Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz in Germany, followed by his first gallery exhibition, The Drawn Blank Series, at 群交AV, London, the next year. In 2008 Dylan also received America's most prestigious literary award: a Pulitzer Prize special citation, in recognition of his ‘profound impact on popular music and American culture'.

Dylan continued to expand and diversify his visual art throughout the 2010s, creating several new series which were exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide: The Brazil Series premiered at the National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, in 2010; The Asia Series and Revisionist Art at the Gagosian, New York in 2011 and 2012 respectively; The New Orleans Series at the Palazzo Reale, Milan, in 2013, also travelling onto the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, in 2016; and Face Value at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2013, before touring to the Museum of National History, Copenhagen, in 2014. 

During this period, 群交AV launched the first exhibition of Dylan's critically acclaimed ironwork sculptures, Mood Swings (2013); The Beaten Path, a collection of landscapes inspired by the expansive American landscape in 2016; and Mondo Scripto, the first major exhibition of handwritten lyrics accompanied by sketches in 2018. In 2019, a landmark retrospective exhibition, titled Retrospectrum, opened at the Modern Art Museum, Shanghai, featuring a vast collection of more than 250 of Dylan’s artworks. The display was the most visited exhibition in Shanghai that year.

The 2010s were also marked by numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour, awarded by President Barack Obama in 2012. In 2013 Dylan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, Germany; and received the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, the highest French order for military and civil accomplishment. In 2016, Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the world's most prestigious literary award, for 'having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition'. He is the first musician and songwriter in history to receive the honour.

In music, Dylan released several new albums to critical acclaim, including Tempest in 2021, as well Shadows in the Night in 2015; an homage to the great American songbook. Dylan paid further tribute to traditional American ‘standards’ in 2017, with the release of the three-disc record, Triplicate.

Dylan continued performing around 100 shows a year across the world since 1988. When live performances were put on hold in early 2020, he used this rare hiatus to focus more time on welding and painting, as revealed in an interview with the New York Times.

In June 2020, with the world in the midst of uncertainty, Dylan released Rough and Rowdy Ways, his first album of original songs in eight years, preceded by the surprise release of three new tracks, 'Murder Most Foul', 'I Contain Multitudes' and 'False Prophet'.

Following on from the resounding success of Bob Dylan: Retrospectrum in Shanghai, the exhibition continued to tour in Asia, opening at the Today Art Museum in Beijing in 2020, followed by the Jupiter Museum of Art in Shenzhen. The following year, in November 2021, Retrospectrum travelled to the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami, and the MAXXI Museum in Rome in 2023.

In November 2021, 群交AV exhibited Deep Focus, a series in which Dylan selected source material from films, using arresting movie stills and transforming them into richly textural paintings. The series spotlights Dylan’s acute ability to fix moments in time, as well as his lifelong interest in film and the camera’s potential to manipulate reality.

2022 was a major year for Bob Dylan as a visual artist. His largest sculpture to date, Rail Car, was constructed and unveiled at Château la Coste, a 600-acre sculpture park near Aix-en Provence, France. This work, placed upon 42 metres of railway track, stands at 15.5m long and 4.7m high. Alongside Dylan’s monumental sculpture, the prestigious site also exhibits works by Alexander Calder, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin and Ai Weiwei. To coincide with the installation, the Renzo Piano Pavilion at Château la Coste presented an exhibition of Dylan’s paintings titled Drawn Blank in Provence. The display featured works from Drawn Blank, alongside paintings by modern masters including Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, exploring their influence and the art historical affinities with Dylan’s series.

As Bob Dylan continues to perform on his widely acclaimed Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour, in May 2025, a solo show of 97 new mixed media artworks, titled Point Blank, opens at 群交AV, London. The exhibition provides a visual journal which offers an insight into Dylan’s sensibility for storytelling; finding poetic resonance in the details, characters and objects that make up his dynamic imagination and unique worldview. Dylan explains that in creating these paintings: ‘The idea was not only to observe the human condition, but to throw myself into it with great urgency.’