The celebrated British actor Gary Oldman is showing his photographs in the UK for the first time, in an exhibition at East London’s Flowers Gallery.

Gary Oldman Backseat, Prague (2013)
Photo: Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

The exhibition “Slipping Glimpsers”—which has travelled from Museo De Las Artes in Guadalajara, Mexico—came about as Oldman has a long-standing friendship with the painter George Blacklock, whom he met while preparing for his role in Honest, Decent and True (1986), a tv film about the advertising business.

The pair struck up a friendship based on creative exchange that has lasted until the present day.

Gary Oldman, Philippe, Prague (2013).
Photo: Courtesy of Flowers Gallery.

“People keep asking why we are showing together, the simple answer to this is that we have been friends for a long time and so we want to,” George Blacklock said in statement.

“The longer answer to this question is to similarly answer a further, more intimate, question—what has sustained this friendship over the last 30 years? In that time we have always talked a lot about what we do individually, in order to find out more about the creative process. It’s an underlying obsession we share,” Blacklock added.

George Blacklock, Ancestral Voices 3 (2014). 
Photo: Courtesy of Flowers Gallery London and New York.

Blacklock has created a series of paintings—based on a lexicon of shapes developed from extensive study of Michelangelo’s Pieta in the Florence Academy—which have been set in dialogue with Oldman’s photographs, which, in an attempt to mimic the range of vision of the human eye, have been shot entirely on Swing-lens Widelux F6B.

Gary Oldman, Self-Portrait, Albuquerque (2015).
Photo: Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

The legendary actor has only exhibited his photography once before: in 2012 in Berlin, at the Kennedy’s Museum, as part of a collaboration with Paul Smith.

Oldman mainly photographs behind the scenes of his films, and at the London show there are photographs on view from films such as The Book of Eli (2010), and Child 44 (2015).

Gary Oldman, Reflection, New Mexico (2009). 
Photo: Courtesy of Flowers Gallery.

“Slipping Glimpsers” is on view at Flowers Gallery, London, from April 15 -May 14, 2016.