The artists in this week’s gallery picks explore duality.
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1. Leehyun Kim paints to reveal the emotion underneath the masked expressions of passersby at Pheonix Gallery
2. Fuel to the fire forms a bridge between the two figures Ricardo Brey unites within himself: on the one hand the historical artist at a crucial time in the history of Cuban art, and on the other the artist who lives and works in Flanders, and makes work that is highly contemporary, critical to the consumption of images and the slickness in which they now tend to dress themselves at Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen
3. Ryan Callanan aka RYCA draws upon a broad spectrum of Contemporary popular culture in his works; referencing film, music and art history that is often seen as refreshingly comic and accessible. With early influences including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Ryan would take classic Warhol imagery and replace its subject with Star Wars and other movie references in his work at Copro Gallery
4. Chloe Wise conflates so-called “guilty” commercial, gastronomical, and sexual pleasures—it bags, carb-rich breakfast foods, and fetish gear— creating imagined hybrids of frivolity and excess. Cast in urethane, strikingly painted with trompe l’oeil effects, and re-contextualized as art objects, food and fashion are rid of their use value and are planted firmly in the symbolic at Division Gallery
5. In his new body of work, Yinka Shonibare contemplates the changing state of the Earth’s climate and the human instinct for survival in the face of the extreme weather experienced worldwide. Rage of the Ballet Gods sees Shonibare connecting with myth to find solace in the fantastical during an unnerving time at James Cohan Gallery
6. “At the heart of these works is the eternal push and pull of the spirit. The two-headed beast, the twin within, living just beneath the skin, sharing the shell and breathing life in through the cracks. They are psychic creatures blistered by hope and beaten with twinges of nostalgia” Sarah Louise Davey on her works in The Garden of No Distant Place at Paradigm Arts
