My New Favourite Shop by Leslie Thompson

Jo Manby

A review of ‘My New Favourite Shop’ by Leslie Thompson, an artist based at Venture Arts, Manchester. Thompson has recreated his favourite shop inside PAPER Gallery and Paper2, a development springing from his black comic book heroes series of the pandemic years, and based on his beloved trips to the Star Wars Man action figure shop at Afflecks Palace. The exhibition is part of A Modest Show, the artist-led collateral to British Art Show 9 (BAS9), visiting Manchester this spring and summer.

For ‘My New Favourite Shop’, the self-styled artist drawing superstar, Leslie Thompson, has staged a takeover of PAPER Gallery and Paper2, recreating his beloved Star Wars Man model shop at Afflecks Palace in Manchester. ‘My New Favourite Shop’ is part of the collateral programme to BAS9, A Modest Show, previewed alongside this review.

Thompson’s installation includes his own action hero models, a series featuring people from his own life as well as contemporary film and TV culture, lovingly reproduced as small, commercially packaged products, for sale to the public via PAPER Gallery. Even Marc, the man who runs the Afflecks shop, is represented in one of these multiples, and was present in person at the private view of Thompson’s show, along with Thompson himself and his brother Geoff.

As visitors enter PAPER Gallery, with its atmospheric Pantone blue walls, to the left stands a glass vitrine, just like the display cases in the Afflecks shop. Inside it is a battalion of identical drawn, painted and printed paper cut-out models. The models represent Leslie himself, wearing a suit and holding an action figure on a visit to the Star Wars Man shop. Each model stands mounted on a red Perspex base. Above the vitrine, on a high shelf, is a phalanx of cardboard packaging boxes with printed labels featuring Thompson’s name and a logo he designed, inspired by He-Man and other similar brands.

The back wall of the gallery, facing the door, is occupied by a display rack system where a range of 22 different action hero models are displayed. Each hero is drawn, painted and printed out, and stands inside a blister pack against a printed cardboard background that compliments and contextualises the figure. On the reverse are the handwritten, print repro’d notes that Thompson has composed which further describe the circumstances, biographies and milieus of these figures. Each one, encased in its packaging, emphasises the status of the work as an artist’s multiple.

Thompson and his supporters at Venture Arts have pulled off an outstanding show at PAPER. The throwaway culture of cartoons, daytime TV, matinees and advertising have been transformed into a compelling, unique exhibition that occupies the fine line between commerce and fine art. You can look at it and bring to mind Keith Haring’s Pop Shop, a retail outlet set up by Haring in SoHo, New York in 1986, allowing the public greater access to his work by selling it reproduced on T-shirts, toys, magnets, badges and posters. Or Andy Warhol’s obsession with celebrities and art production line ethic. Or Andreas Gursky and his photographs of endless supermarket shelves and ranks of white plastic chill cabinets saturated by strip lights. ‘My New Favourite Shop’ is built from the same kind of perspectives on culture and society, the same motivating force. Just the right balance is struck between the handmade and the machine reproduced, between art in its rightful sense and the kind of manufacturing necessary for retail or wholesale trade.

Taking up an artist’s residency at PAPER Gallery, Thompson will be present in Paper2 on Saturdays and will be using the smaller space as a workplace to continue with his super hero action figure work. I asked Thompson, visiting him recently at Venture Arts where he makes most of his work, when he first learned to draw. ‘I first learn to draw since the 1980s or before. Since I was young and small.’ Who was the first person to inspire him as an artist? ‘When I was young the old teachers to inspire me to turn out to be an artist drawer. Since years, since I got older, and younger as a superstar.’

What comes over clearly in this show, and in hearing Thompson describing his work and interests, is the sheer conscientious productiveness and hard work involved. He is a diligent artist who can pour hours of labour into his work and come up with visual material that is enthralling both in its level of detail and its aesthetic effects.

Thompson is also rightly ambitious. Based at Venture Arts Studios in Manchester, he has had a successful artistic career for some years now, with his signature style of intricate drawings layering popular culture references and personal memories. His entire collection, on show with Manchester Contemporary in 2016, sold out on the opening day. The following year he had his first solo exhibition at Project Ability in Glasgow, which featured work from over the past twenty years, including stitched work such as 70s Afro Lady and drawn work illustrating live scenarios such as St Bede’s Close Watching TV with Mum and Geoffrey, together with characters and scenes from the 1970s to the 1990s such as The Jungle Book, King Kong, wrestling matches, among a vast range of popular culture references.

More recent accolades include commissions to paint murals for Sheila Bird Studios and LADbible Head Office. He also specialises in capturing events with live drawing and has been commissioned to do this for DaDaFest, Creative Minds North and Hubbub Theatre, along with numerous Venture Arts events. In 2019 he had his first international exhibition as part of a group show staged in Tokyo. In 2021, his work, Animals from Memory, was acquired by the UK Government Art Collection.

From 23 May to 28 July this year, Thompson will also be exhibiting a collection of art work at 45 Hilton Street in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. The show, ‘In The Making Since a Hundred of Years’, is the culmination of a lockdown exploration of the history of black comic book superheroes. Thompson’s drawings are a reinterpretation of the characters he has researched, made using his ‘memory and imagination’. Thompson summarises the creation of this work as follows:

‘In the making since a hundred of years, the dark black comic books was made and they are good heroes in the cartoon. They are fantastic in comics in animation in the 1930’s 40’s 50’s 60’s 70’s tracking down crime all over America and across the world and out of this earth.

‘It is a story about these black African American characters in these comics since a hundred years of entertaining. It is exciting to see all these new cape crusaders in the early period of all history. Could be in the record books soon. Good news. It’s fabulous and good creating this picture on the drawing paper.’

I asked him how did it feel to be a successful artist? ‘I am a good Artist Drawing Superstar to keep it up.’ It is the persistence and industriousness involved in the creating of his work that matters. He has had difficult times in his life, and misses his late mother and brother Joseph Junior Thompson, whom he includes drawings of in ‘My New Favourite Shop’. But his strength of character and endurance shows through in his drawing, painting and modelling, with its endlessly cumulative, transformative power.

Leslie Thompson action hero figures can be purchased at https://paper-gallery.co.uk/leslie-thompson-my-new-favourite-shop