Johnny Depp's first major UK art exhibition opened Tuesday at Halcyon Gallery on New Bond Street, per Deadline. The show follows the Shanghai edition of A Bunch of Stuff, and it runs to paintings, drawings, collages, and his first sculpture.
The gallery's own release asks you to "encounter his art on its own terms." Five words doing the work of five hundred. The terms are: it is on Bond Street, it is in a gallery that handles serious money, and the founder is on the record calling him a "true Renaissance man." You are the audience. The terms are the terms.
The centerpiece is the one that tells the whole story. His first sculpture is called The Bunnyman: a half-human, half-rabbit guardian carrying a "sword of truth," per Deadline's reporting. It began as a drawing by his son Jack, then about five, and it has since migrated into sketches, paintings, and prints. A rabbit holding a sword of truth. Some people rebrand with a fragrance line. This is more efficient.
The rebrand has been a long arc: the courtrooms, the memoir, the music, the tattoos, the paintings. Each stop was supposed to be a different genre. By the Bond Street leg, the genre is whatever a gallery can hang. The gallery does not judge. The gallery prices. "Encounter his art on its own terms" is the PR way of saying "we are not commenting on the rest."
YOUR TURN: Is the gallery show a rebrand, or is it the rebrand finding better lighting?
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