You can figure (not that he’ll be complaining) that Apple would have dearly loved this exhibition to have been slated for April 2014. That would have been exactly 40 years after his last Serpentine exhibition that showed 14 years of his work. Realistically though Billy Apple’s not going to wait another eight years just to land the 50th anniversary and it's pretty damn cool to be able to do a show like this at 81. Typically Apple’s birthday is said to be the last day of each year - all very tidy as you'd expect.
The curator of the Serpentine exhibition is Hans Ulrich Obrist who has previously included Apple into one of his Museum in Agency of Unrealized Projects and has also interviewed him as part of his Interview-everyone-in-the-entire-world project a few years back. As far as we know the only other New Zealander to have had a solo exhibition at the Serpentine was the sculptor John Panting in 1975. And all this to let us get away with a dodgy lookalike between Barry Bates (pre-Apple) Lathering, Alicante Spain, April 1960 and Philip Larkin just having a shave in 1957 (from the Independent)
Images: Left, Philip Larkin, right, Barry Bates
