Time Takes a Cigarette

In the past year, art — particularly new art — has become very distant to our lives. We have not seen it and we have not shared it with other people. We have not been able to put our noses up against it and learn from it. There were no festivals; there were no fairs. There was no backdrop draped over the back of the stage. Art was a minor casualty of 2020, all told, but its absence coloured our lives.

In the past year, at the same time, we became more intimate with art. Extreme domesticity and extreme solitude, with all the good and bad vibes they’ve wrought, are conditions that have drawn us emotionally closer and more sensitive to what art does while the world rages outside. Art has answered the nausea of feeling frozen in place and adrift from time. It has offered us both somewhere to situate ourselves and somewhere to escape.

Crystals form on the inside of the cave that is our recent existence. Their twinkle provides light. As much as we currently understand anything, we understand this exhibition to be

Josh Lilley is pleased to present Time Takes a Cigarette, an exhibition of new, recent and historical painting and sculpture by 14 international artists.