Billy Apple (1935–2021)
‘The Artist Has to Live like Everybody Else’. Two exhibitions have used this tagline as their title, one in 1993 at the Warwick Brown Gallery, a gallery now long gone. And one at Auckland Art Gallery, where it named Christina Barton’s 2015 retrospective.
Originating circa 1984/85, in the 1990s it became a Billy Apple slogan or tagline, carried on numerous ‘page works’ in now defunct magazines, and serving as the subtitle of each of the burgeoning Paid series works-on-paper. Most recently, it was echoed in the claim on a couple of late paintings: ‘The Artist Will Live Forever.’ Of course, his death reminds us this is not true, the artist has to die like everybody else. Sad to say.
The artist knew it. However, he’d also discovered that death need not rule out his immortality. Having
