From Barrie Bates to Billy Apple: 1960–74

This was Barrie Bates’s first major survey show, featuring work related to his metamorphosis into Billy Apple.

New Zealander Barrie Bates studied at the Royal College of Art, and it was whilst in London in 1962, aged nearly 27, that he came up with his alter ego, Billy Apple, dyeing his hair and changing his name. Billy Apple then went on to settle in New York in 1964, where he became associated with Pop artists including Warhol and Oldenburg, perhaps most notably in the exhibition The American Supermarket in the Upper East Side, in which Apple presented a brightly painted bronze watermelon work.

This exhibition at the Serpentine was the artist’s first major survey show, featuring works that related to the metamorphosis of Bates into Apple, and of the artist into his art.