An article in the U.K.’s Guardian by Kate Connolly provides a lot of interesting details on the exhibition of Bob Dylan’s paintings currently taking place at the Chemnitz Art Gallery in Germany.

Those who don’t ask, don’t get, Ingrid Mössinger was brought up to believe. So when she came across Drawn Blank, a book of Bob Dylan sketches in an antiquarian bookshop in Manhattan two years ago, her first thought was to ask him if she could mount an exhibition.

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He replied within days. “I couldn’t believe it when I got a positive answer - I think he was just waiting to be asked, and quite simply until then, no one had,” she said. Mössinger’s ambitions remained modest - to display his snapshot-style drawings and sketches compiled while on tour in Europe, America and Asia between 1989 and 1992 in a small exhibition in the gallery that she has managed for 11 years. “But like a true artist, he wanted to make new works,” she says.

In a burst of creativity over eight months he created 320 works in watercolour and gouache, digitally enlarging them on deckle-edged paper. In a similar approach to his songs, Dylan produced three or four versions of a single motif by altering both the medium and the colours. “I was fascinated to learn of Ingrid’s interest in my work, and it gave me the impetus to realise the vision I had for these drawings many years ago,” the 66-year-old writes in the exhibition notes. “If not for this interest, I don’t know if I even would have revisited them.”

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The show does not disappoint and the critical response has, so far, been positive. Some critics have even gone as far as to compare Dylan to Munch and Matisse, as well as to the German expressionists Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, for his dark lines and bold colours. Edward Hopper has also been cited in the way in which it is the objects for the paintings that speak - the ships, bicycles, train tracks and bulbous TV screens - rather than the people, who are often portrayed as silent and anonymous, like the formless Guitar Player.

There are already plans for the exhibition to travel, to such places as South Korea, Stockholm and New York.

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