50,000 Light-years from Home by JAN HILLOV

This work began in 1968 as a coloured drawing on a piece of wallpaper, which I created for an exhibition at secondary school. It depicted a world that sprang entirely from my imagination: enormous white structures, strange towers, arches, bridges, staircases, tunnels and geometric shapes, brought together to form a gigantic, impossible city in space, set against a cosmic backdrop. Our history teacher apparently saw something special in it and bought the drawing for thirty guilders.

The long-cherished photograph of the exhibited work had faded considerably over the years. To breathe new life into the piece, I first used AI to remove the old colours and make the lines clearly visible again. I then used the drawing as a starting point for a completely new work of art, whilst preserving the original drawing.

The architecture of the old drawing still forms the heart of the image. The white buildings and structures now stand in a dramatic landscape of light and deep shadows. In the foreground, a dark, mysterious setting emerges, whilst behind the enormous city an endless cosmic expanse appears, filled with stars, nebulae and distant galaxies.

A tiny human figure stands in the bottom right-hand corner amongst the gigantic structures. Not only does he convey the colossal scale of this fantasy world, but he also holds symbolic significance for me. One might see him as the artist himself, returning almost sixty years later to the world he once imagined as a young man.

‘50,000 Lightyears from Home’ is thus a journey through time: from a fantasy drawing on wallpaper from 1968 to a new, powerfully surrealist work of art in the twenty-first century.