Neon graveyard.
Joe Lycett brings his oddball eye for grief, nostalgia and cultural debris to
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery this summer with
EVERY THING MUST GO, his first major solo exhibition as an artist. Over the last year, the comedian, broadcaster and proud Brummie has been making paintings devoted to the things that are no longer with us.
Inspired by objects from Birmingham’s collection, the exhibition gathers dozens of new works on deceased celebrities, discontinued chocolate bars, extinct animals and destroyed buildings. Painted in Lycett’s tongue-in-cheek, deliberately childlike style, they present cultural loss as something silly and bright yet faintly mournful.
Lycett has described the exhibition as a “neon graveyard”, and the phrase earns its keep. The paintings look at how culture disappears and what gets remembered. Old phones, lost snacks and departed famous faces sit as small public monuments, asking why certain bits of culture lodge so firmly in the mind, even when they were ridiculous to begin with.
Birmingham anchors the show. Lycett brings his Brummie perspective into the city’s civic collection, with local pride, impeccable comic timing and pop-cultural memory packed into a gleefully overstuffed salon hang. Free to visit,
EVERY THING MUST GO is set to overwhelm, delight and confuse in precisely the way Lycett intends. One for anyone who likes their nostalgia with a punchline.
