Contemporary Art Exhibition

March 2023

Four You Gallery is delighted to present ‘Two Imposters’, an exhibition of new paintings by the London-based artist Dannielle Hodson. The show takes its title from a line in Rudyard Kipling’s If— (c.1895), a poem which characterizes “Triumph and Disaster” not as contrasting extremes of personal experience, but as a pair of twin “imposters”, to be met with the same unruffled equanimity. Kipling’s attempt to perceive a deeper unity behind apparent polar opposites finds a chime in Hodson’s canvases. These are works that demand we suspend conventional approaches to reading the painted image, and see beyond established pictorial binaries – not only figuration and abstraction, but also foreground and background, centre and periphery, composition and detail, colour and form.

Hodson’s paintings are born of a process of spontaneous, almost automatic mark making, from which recognizable motifs begin to emerge when the layers of pigment on her support achieve a critical mass. Looking at these works, they feel less planned than somehow channeled, as though their fractured, dreamlike narratives were not quite her invention, but rather visions she had received, like the 18th century artist and poet William Blake glimpsing angels in the trees of Peckham Rye. (Hodson has cited Blake as an ambient influence on this body of paintings, alongside the thought of Carl Jung, Ursula Le Guin’s 1968-2001 sequence of Earthsea books, and John Fowles’ 1965 novel The Magus. If there is a common denominator to these co-ordinates, it is a focus on the nature of illusion, and how stories shape reality).

In Masque (2022-23), what might be a masked ball or carnival parade is in full swing, its participants’ bodies morphing into a single, grotesque being, or else deliquescing into abstract passages of paint. Like figures in a painting by James Ensor or Hieronymous Bosch, they seem caught up in their own strange, libidinal energies, although we should note the huge, disembodied arm that stretches down the left side of the canvas, ending in a pale, clasped fist. Is this the Hand of God, and if so, is it here to guide or to punish, to cheer the revelers on or to sweep them away in some terrible apocalypse? At first glance Something that Wasn’t (2023) is a more bucolic prospect, recalling as it does Eugène Delacroix’s canvas The Bathers (1854), in which a group of young women immerse themselves in a pristine forest pool. And yet, as the title of Hodson’s work suggests, such fantasies of humanity’s harmonious communion with Nature exist against the background of a darker reality. Perhaps this is why Hodson’s anthropomorphized foliage is essayed not in verdant greens but in grimy blacks and browns, as though it’s been stained and choked by centuries of pollutants. Such signs of systemic breakdown make way for what appears to be an image of utter collapse in The artist is Present (2022-230), in which a human figure (Hodson?) slumps amid the burst upholstery of an armchair, whose stuffing resembles spools of wobbly intestines, which have somehow sprouted eyes and teeth. Despite this calamity, the figure wears a smile, and her right hand reaches for a painter’s palette. We cannot rule out a resurrection, a marshalling of all this apparent chaos into significant form.

The title of Hodson’s exhibition is echoed in two portrait works, Imposter One (2022-23) and Imposter Two (2022-23). Given that portraiture is a genre bound up with the notion of providing an authentic likeness of a real-life sitter, we might wonder what it means for these figures to be labelled thus. Have they performed some kind identity theft? This seems unlikely, given that they’re product of Hodson’s imagination, and have no flesh and blood counterparts. Considering their absurd, attention-hungry garments and their weirdly unstable physiognomies, perhaps the only deception they practice is self-deception, and even that is beginning to unravel. Are the two Imposters suffering from imposter syndrome? If so, it’s of a piece with Hodson’s wider project, in which triumph and disaster shade indistinguishably into one another, and the self – like bodies, like the endlessly mutable stuff of paint – is always in flux.

February 2023

Four You Gallery is pleased to present ‘Naked Light,’ an exhibition of artworks by Washington born and London based artist Gianna Dispenza (b. 1990). Complex, subversive, and somewhat scientific, Dispenza’s drawings resist the stereotype. They are fluctuating and abstract depictions of the female form that disappear into pure materiality in some lights, yet remarkably confront as bodily stature in others. Dispenza’s artworks are driven both by extensive research around the themes and materials of her work as well as a submission to the subconscious. The artworks exhibited in ‘Naked Light’ are starkly contemporary yet refer to the way that the female nude has been presented, and, more stimulatingly, misrepresented throughout art history.

In 2014, Gianna Dispenza was awarded with a BFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute, and more recently Dispenza graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2020). Over the past ten years, the artists’ work has been exhibited extensively across Europe since her undergraduate, as well as in the USA, Korea, and Lebanon. Dispenza’s talent has also been recognised with multiple awards and residencies including Beirut Art Residency with Darryl Westly (2017), and a residency at Galleria Ramo in Como, Italy (2021). Dispenza was also a finalist for the Bridgeman Studio Award: The Art of Diversity in 2020.

January 2023

Four You Gallery are delighted to present CHIP FAT AND TARMAC, an exhibition of paintings by London based artist Bethany Hadfield (b. 1994). Claustrophobic and fluctuating, the paintings transcend material reality. They are sprayed acrylic multiplicities of networks; threads of the artists inspirations sprawl off the canvas. Drawn initially on a 3D modelling programme, the artworks come into being and pulse with the charge of Hadfield’s interests including vascular plants, anthropocentric pressure on species and intra-relations.

In 2016, Bethany Hadfield was awarded a BA (Hons) in Fine Art, Painting from Wimbledon College of Art, and more recently Hadfield graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2022). In – between, and during her periods at university, the artist exhibited extensively in group shows in London, as well as in
Japan. Hadfield has been nominated for awards including the Jonathan Harvey Studio Award (London).

December 2022

Four You Gallery is delighted to present CLOAKED, an exhibition of gilded artworks by a group of young female painters. The exhibition will include works by Dannielle Hodson, Sara Lee, Jingwi Wang, So Young Kim, Leyla Pekmen, Cheong Yoon, and Lindsey Jean McLean.

To cloak, as a transitive verb, is to disguise: to cover with, or as if with, a cloak. Whilst the paintings in this exhibition are dense, confronting, and immediate, they are images of embellishment and consequential disguise. The works, more specifically their subjects, aren’t hiding, but there are elements of each painting that are in fact hidden. Embellishment in the form of grotesque gargoyle like figures, cacti spikes, colour camouflage and digitisation contribute to the visual noise which in such abundance vibrates through CLOAKED.

Dannielle Hodson’s laboured artworks accumulate to the point where she stops and asks, ‘have I spent too much time here, have I laboured too much over that form there?’ The answer? Often yes. At this point Hodson retracts, stripping paint and distinguished features, part revealing the veiled incongruous. Her illusive characters in the narrative paintings emerge from landscapes that suffocate. Much like Leyla Pekmen’s, they mimic the purpose of the canvas and perfectly frame the composed chronicle. Hodson’s portrait subjects also perform in the same way, holding turbulent tales within their molten faces.

With a similar feeling towards the absurd, Pekmen’s ‘Neverland’ manipulates nature by granting it human capabilities. Notice the arms of the trees warmly embracing their neighbours. The purple of the distant porous mountains, whilst inaccurate feels familiar; an image that a child might craft. The naïve appearance of Pekmen’s artworks is reminiscent of So Young Kim’s fragmented and playful compositions. Beginning their existence as sculptures, Kim takes the forms onto canvas through digital manipulation, drawing and acrylic painting to investigate them further.

Naivety and a chilling innocence resonate through the surreal portraits by Cheong Yoon. The features of her subjects are exaggerated in their form. Their eyes are large, dark, seeping voids. Yet warmth in the lightness, which Yoon skilfully depicts, is redeeming of the artwork’s darker undertones.

Sara Lee’s paintings possess similar digitised characteristics. Impressive is the skill both Lee and Kim demonstrate in forming such flatness on the canvas, the subjects appear just as they would if beaming through a screen. One must be cautious and not fall victim to the sickly sweet, wide-eyed subjects – like those of Cheong Yoon’s. Their fluorescent pinks, greens and yellows reverberate off the canvas, an intoxicating confusion veils reality. Lindsey Jean McLean’s incandescent colours defy despite the restricted positions her characters bear. They appear entangled ‘trapped in acts of concealment and destruction’ yet challenging, albeit with caution in the form of obscuring boas and fans, the oppressive canonical male gaze.

October 2022

Four You Gallery are pleased to present “Lullaby,” an exhibition of paintings by Turkish/British artist Leyla Pekmen. Currently based in Istanbul, Pekmen paints and sculpts at a local artists studio. This demonstration of artworks celebrates the medium of paint and exhibits the knowing and intimate relationship that Leyla Pekmen has developed with it over the many years that she’s been using it. This amounts to almost of all her life. Whilst admittedly her work “changes depending on my [her] emotions,” “Lullaby” is playful, sweet, and entirely joyful. One must revel in the sun-drenched artworks and return to a summer gone by. Much like the soothing refrain of a lullaby, this exhibition of paintings resonates like a gentle and warm embrace.

In 2021, Pekmen opened her first solo exhibition in Istanbul, and participated in a group show alongside other internationally recognised and respected female artists. As a result of her extensive exposure in recent years, Pekmen’s artworks have been collected globally and very well-received by the art world at large.

September 2022

Four You Gallery are pleased to present ‘Dreamland 304,’ an exhibition of mixed media paintings by London based artist Ji Won Cha (b. South Korea). Ji Won has a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, and is currently studying for her master’s at the Royal College of Art.

‘Dreamland 304’ refers to the HTTP 304 not modified status code computer error, which means that the website requested hasn’t been updated since the last time it was accessed. Whilst such coded language seems impenetrable, it’s somewhat metaphoric leaning sheds light on the themes present in Ji Won Cha’s paintings. Through painting, the artist unlocks and ‘updates’ childhood memories and tales consumed at a young age and not often consciously considered now. These nostalgia’s combined with the artist’s current consciousness make for rich interrogations of nature and nurture, and the conclusions are elegant articulations of how one’s childhood affects their experiences in adulthood.

July 2022

Four You Gallery is pleased to present ‘Software:’ a series of oil paintings of linens, on linen, by London based artist Hannah Knox. The artist was born in the city in which she resides and gained her MA degree in painting from The Royal College of Art, also in London. Knox graduated in 2007, and her career has followed an upward trajectory since. Her artwork has been exhibited extensively in the UK, and more recently in Spain; Knox is represented by Badr el Jundi Gallery in Malaga. Selected solo shows include ‘Over All,’ Badr el Jundi Gallery, Spain 2022, ‘Tempur,’ CSM Project Space, London (2015) and ‘BUFF,’ Ceri Hand Gallery, London (2013).

Through a portal of fashions, Hannah Knox hopes that her exhibition ‘Software’ transports her audience elsewhere, to a place, or a fond memory “like a song that makes you travel.” With generosity and skill, Knox uses paint to describe; the oily brushstrokes and garment patterns articulate like language.

June 2022

Four You Gallery is pleased to present ‘Aspiring to be Angel,’ an exhibition of paintings by Hong Kong based artist Catherine Grossrieder. Born in 1984 in Bangkok to a Thai mother and Swiss father, Grossrieder was raised in Hong Kong yet travelled often. Her mixed heritage has led to exposure to varying cultures, and this awareness is richly imbued within her paintings as well as her more graphic works (Grossrieder is also known by her street art alias ‘Cath Love’). The main subject of the paintings in this exhibition is another alter-ego of Grossrieder; ‘Angel’ is a cartoon-like character with chicken features. ‘Aspiring to be Angel’ is an intimate presentation of tender and familiar adolescent moments, one shall learn about ‘Angels’’ life, and consequently come to understand more about the artist who created her.

In 2005, Catherine Grossrieder graduated with a BA in Visual Communications from the University of Newcastle, Australia. Later, in 2007, she gained a MA in Design from the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Whilst this is Grossrieder’s first solo show with Four You Gallery, she exhibited in the group show ‘Next’ which took place in March of this year. Since 2004, the artist has exhibited extensively in Hong Kong, her most recent solo show there ‘A Gallery Warming’ took place at Club Third Gallery in 2018. In the same year, Grossrieder’s work was exhibited in group show ‘East: Urban Contemporary Art from here and abroad’ at Malcolm Smith Gallery in Auckland, New Zealand.

May 2022

Four You Gallery is delighted to present Aysha Nagieva’s first solo show. Some of the works in ‘A Birthday Party’ symbolise defining memories from Moscow born artist Aysha Nagieva’s childhood, and others are associated with significant moments of the artists more recent experiences in adulthood. The playful title was chosen as May is the month in which Nagieva was born, and it also alludes to a particular artwork that greatly inspired the paintings in this exhibition. Martin Creed’s ‘Half the Air in a Given Space,’ is a series of installations of inflated celebration balloons which fill (as the title suggests) half the space of the room in which the work exists. Nagieva was particularly drawn to the Denmark instalment; the baby pink, sickly sweet balloons are wistfully nostalgic yet hold a more threatening undertone which impends an overwhelming suffocation. Exhilaration and disorientation; allure and bounciness.

Whilst it is easy to be charmed by Nagieva’s doll’s bug eyes and plump rosy cheeks, there is a subtle suggestion of something more sinister. The dark voids in which they hover eliminate the cheering warmth that these children’s toys represent off canvas, allowing an uncanniness to subsist. Amy Bessone’s paintings of porcelain statuettes hold a similar peril, yet the noticeable element of the ‘handmade’ is redemptive. Bessone’s and Nagieva’s paintings are almost too kitschy to communicate with a severe, unyielding expression. Nagieva admires the “fluidity and [the] certain degree of effortlessness” Bessone achieves in painting the shiny porcelain.

Studying and living in the UK, Nagieva has noticed that “shiny” things do not appeal to the public here quite like it does in Russia. Nagieva has remarked that the attraction to shiny and gold things is embedded into many Russian cultures, and used in ornate religious memorabilia, the Christmas lights of Moscow, as well as bright, bold soviet propaganda as examples of this allure. The way that Nagieva accurately uses paint to create brightness and sometimes blinding sheen is reminiscent of this fascination with shimmer.

The large works in this exhibition are made up of acrylics and oils, Nagieva uses paint mediums to accommodate extensive layer building. Her smaller works are often just oil, yet she also uses watercolours freehand. Her comfort and ease with using these differing paint types evidences her dexterity and practical skills. In many ways, oil is the antithesis watercolour. To indicate light and the doll’s plastic form Nagieva will use an abundance of oil paint, or by contrast, no watercolour at all. Highlights on her paper works will likely be empty space, the artist uses the whiteness of the paper to achieve dynamism of form.

April 27th – May 8th, 2022
Opening: Wednesday, April 27th, 2022
MR80 – 80 Rue de Turenne, 75001, Paris, FRANCE

Four You Gallery is delighted to present ‘The Triumph of Life’, an exhibition of new paintings by the London-based artist Dannielle Hodson. Inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s apocalyptic masterpiece ‘The Triumph of Death’ (c.1562), in which a hoard of skeletons rampage across a devastated landscape, the title of the show might be understood as an affirmation of human resilience and adaptability in the face of individual and collective trauma, not least the fallout of the ongoing global pandemic. Charged with an urgent organic energy, the motifs in Hodson’s canvases – characteristically, a teeming, often grotesquely comic mass of faces and limbs – feel always on the point of transformation. Unwilling to be trapped in the dead zone of stable, ‘logical’ depiction, they mutate to survive.

Hodson’s paintings emerge from a process of unplanned, almost automatic abstract mark making, and it is only when she has laid down a critical mass of pigment that figurative motifs begin to suggest themselves – something the artist has described as ‘embryonic faces pressing through my paint’, which she then ‘works consciously to bring into full being’. In her painting A Tolerance for Indeterminacy (2022) ¬– a title that echoes the writer Maggie Nelson’s formulation of the intellectual and emotional underpinnings of freedom – Hodson presents us with a vision of what might be a Bruegelesque Armageddon, or (given the presence of a modest rainbow above what might be billowing sails) the budding of a new green world from the smouldering ashes of the old. As our eyes travel across the work, we witness the extraordinary range of Hodson’s painterly address, from supple graphic strokes to passages of impasto abstraction. Paint’s potential to show anything, to be anything, becomes here an index of liberty.

Often absent a core motif around which the composition is organised, the artist’s canvases demand that we forget notions of foreground and background, an image’s centre and its periphery. Instead, we’re invited to practice a radically democratic form of viewing, in which every element of the image is a bearer of equal (and ever-fluid) meaning. Embedding a host of tiny details in that most intractable of shades, Prussian blue, Hodson’s painting Out of the Blue (2022) is both a formal high-wire act and a prompt for us to look harder, to look better, to see more: note the face of the clown that emerges from the foggy ground, its eyelids tugged open by wispy tendrils of paint.

While Hodson’s portrait works are rooted in a long-established art historical genre, they subject its focus, the human face, to a series of destabilizing (and typically very funny) indignities. Looking at When Your Hand is a Sculpture (2022), in which a pair of heads are burdened, or blessed, with a panoply of incommensurate facial features, any notion of the essential boundedness and continuity of the individual human being is cast into doubt. Significantly, Hodson’s title calls our attention not to these jumbled, jostling visages, but to a body part that usually plays a subordinate role in portraiture, the hand, which we are told here is not a living appendage, but rather its sculpted double. If the artist’s invented ‘sitters’ appear alarmed at this eventuality, all staring eyes and open mouths, then they are blithely unaware, or perhaps unconcerned, that their faces are formed not of flesh but of that most animated and endlessly malleable of substances – Hodson’s paints.

April 2022

Four You Gallery are delighted to present ‘Under the Blue Sky,’ Jingyi Wang’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, following the inordinate success of ‘Natural Social Distancing’ a year ago. This exhibition holds a significantly different tone however, the serene blue landscapes call for Wang’s home and invoke a hopeful feeling. The artist continues to utilise the familiar cactus motif as a representative symbol, and surrogate for the human experience. Jingyi Wang has a long-standing relationship with her spiky subjects. She is persistent and inquisitive: her artworks pose profound questions. ‘Under the Blue Sky’ demonstrates the artist’s comfort with and understanding of her medium; she challenges and displays the dexterity of oil paint. Also revealed is her impressive understanding of light and composition, as well as her tender sensitivity around the persisting concerns of today.

Jingyi Wang (b. China, 1989). is a painter based in New York City. With both a Bachelors and Masters degree in Fine Arts under her belt, Wang has arguably perfected her craft. In 2013, she graduated from China Central Academy of Fine Arts, and completed her masters at the New York Academy of Art in 2016. Wang has exhibited extensively across the USA, as well as in China. Last month, her work featured in ‘A Corner Garden with Light’ at the Cao Chang Di international Art Village in Beijing, and in the ‘Future Art Award Virtual Exhibition’ at MOZAIK Philanthropy in Los Angeles. In the past year, Jingyi Wang’s artwork has been covered by Create! Magazine, China underground, and China Daily.

March 2022

Four You Gallery is delighted to present NEXT its first 2022 collective exhibition showcasing the works of Catherine Grossrieder, So Young Kim, Hannah Knox and Leyla Pekmen. On Display a first presentation of what is coming next.

The Next Portrait
Hannah Knox shirt paintings shift between portrait and still-life, abstraction and figuration. The garments depicted – like their physical counterpart – can retain a time and place, holding a memory within them, as a pocket contains an object. These unbodied shirts provide a space to project; a recollection, a lover, a holiday, a ‘wish-list’ item from an online shopping basket.
Paradoxical and containing a series of antonyms, they are figurative without a figure, they are folded but flat. These shirts are made of linen, but you can’t wear them, and they have buttons that you can’t undo. Varying in scale, from life-size and intimate, to God-like and majestic, they switch from generic pre-packaged shirts for disposable office workers, to giant-sized XXXXL proportions, other worldly, out of reach, speaking of status, desire and the factory line.

The Next Landscape
Nature, landscapes and life’s simple pleasures are recurring themes in Leyla Pekmen’s works. In a world where it’s hard to escape from negativity, Pekmen explores her fascination with nature and pleasureful memories as a coping mechanism. These memories painted with vibrant colors, almost surreal, create a dreamlike paradise. The artist views herself as a storyteller and sees her work as a get away from the reality of everyday life and ‘an invitation to dream’. Inspired by Ottoman miniature artists, her distinctive naive style radiates joy and tranquility and expresses the spirit of her multicultural background.

The Next Object
So Young Kim’s process is one of collecting fragments and debris from the studio (Styrofoam, severed wire, broken plastic), which she then transforms into new compositions. Beginning their existence as sculptures, Kim takes the forms onto canvas through drawing and acrylic painting to investigate them further. There is a symbiosis across her artistic practice, all acts of thinking and making feed into one another. The outcomes are rich, well-informed, and deeply stimulating.
Influences include Heidegger’s musings on the object/thing relation. This posits that an object becomes a thing when it can no longer serve its common function. Hito Steyerl’s writings on images has been a grounding focus, and Kim has found an affiliation with Steyerl’s designation of image as object: “image should no longer be seen as emblems of objects but as objects themselves.”

The Next Character
The source of Catherine Grossrieder’s creativity comes from her endless imagination and her cultural and social conditioning. The artist enjoys creating cute as well as more surreal, twisted art and hopes that viewers not only appreciate it superficially, but for what it could also communicate.

February 2022

‘No Fork Needed’ is an exhibition of mixed media artworks by Iranian, South-East Asian and British artist, Leily Moghtader Mojdehi (b. England, 1999). Four You Gallery are proud to showcase her latest work in her first solo exhibition, which has been produced over the last 6 months since Mojdehi’s graduation from Goldsmiths.

The artworks exhibited in ‘No Fork Needed’ explore Leily Moghtader Mojdehi’s rich cultural heritage. The layered collages are reminiscent of the multitude of colour, patterns, ornaments, food and textiles that the artist was surrounded by throughout her childhood. ‘No Fork Needed’ is a humorous and informal celebration of snacking: a ritual in which we all participate whilst at home; to pass the time, to comfort, to satisfy. The artworks are tactile in both form and content, and fondly portray the pleasure of eating with one’s hands: subverting the formal and ceremonious western dining tradition. To feed is to care, and Mojdehi’s artworks are an expression of love through action. Mojdehi’s comprehensive demonstration, much like snacking, gratifies a craving for artworks that cheer and delight.

January 2022

Four You Gallery is delighted to present ‘The Calling,’ an exhibition of bountiful and exuberant oil paintings by Brooklyn based artist Alonsa Guevara. A soulful delight, these works are a celebration of colour, nature, humanity and the surreal. With generosity of spirit and the withholding of nothing, the artist shares with us her experience of becoming a mother. The audience, like the artists subjects are bathed in radiant light. Guevara hopes the viewer experiences fluctuating feelings of attraction, calm, ambiguity, and empowerment.

Alonsa Guevara is an artist living and working in New York. Guevara was born in Rancagua, Chile, but lived in on the farm upon which her father worked in Ecuador from the age of 5 to 11 years old. In 2009, Alonsa Guevara received a BFA from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Then in 2011, she moved to New York City to complete the MFA programme at the New York Academy of Art. In 2013 Guevara was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and received the Academy’s Fellowship award in 2015.

Recent exhibitions include ‘Apparitions’ a solo show at Anna Zorina Gallery in NYC in February 2021 (a mere 4 months after Guevara’s son was born), and ‘Apocalypse Now’ at Gallery Pousen in Copenhagen, Denmark (2020). Alonsa’s work has been published in Forbes Magazine, Time Out NYC Magazine, VICE, among others and has exhibited internationally, including China, Mexico, Denmark, Argentina, and Chile.

December 2021

Four Your Gallery is delighted to present ‘In the Eye of the Beholder’, a group show curated by Four You Gallery presenting the works of four female artists. The exhibition explores the beauty of life which is the subjectivity of life; the truth of what we see differs through our own unique lens of experience. And therefore, unless you perceive it through your own lens, then for you, it doesn’t exist. It exists only ‘In the Eye of the Beholder’. With this exhibition, the intention is exploring your truth in however way resonates with you, whether you’re the artist of the viewer.

Dannielle Hodson is a British artist based in London whose works are a product of everything she consumes through her senses in her daily life experience, as she pushes the boundaries of what’s real and what isn’t.

Jingyi Wang is a Chinese artist based in New York who adopts cacti-human hybrid characters in her works as a means of expressing herself, while exploring the relationship between nature and culture.

Aysha Nagieva is a Russian artist based in London who pays tribute to her Russian heritage in her self-portraits, while she explores her childhood memories and how they’ve impacted her adult truth today.

Xu Yang is a Chinese artist based in London who expresses her truth in her paintings through the theme of performance and theatrics, inspired by artists as well as landmarks and cultures.

November 18th – December 5th, 2021
Opening: Friday, November 19th, 2021
Pavillon Rive Gauche – 8 Frédéric Sauton, 75005, Paris, FRANCE

Four You Gallery is delighted to present ‘My Kinda Vacation’, a solo exhibition presenting the latest work of South Korean born and New York based artist, Stickymonger.

Taking place in Paris from November 18th until December 5th, ‘My Kinda Vacation’ serves as a milestone for Stickymonger as it will be the first ever show featuring exclusively colorful pieces, as opposed to the artist’s preference towards black and white pieces. With this exhibition, the inten- tion behind the artwork is creating a connection with the use of colors. All of the pieces in the show are inspired from what she knows and is familiar with, painting characters from her personal expe- rience.

A self-proclaimed workaholic, the idea of taking a vacation sounds demanding because it’s something that’s unfamiliar to and uncharacteristic of her, which makes taking a vacation sound more like work than it does leisure.
However, she has her own ‘kinda vacation’ to which she subscribes: zoning out. To Stickymonger, the only vacation she knows is zoning out and that is her way of dis- connecting and recharging. Amidst the hustle and bustle of everyday life, having moments throughout the day to reflect is her version of a vacation, making her ‘kinda vacation’ a daily routine and adaptable on the go.

Each painting featured in the exhibition is a different expression of ‘her kinda vaca- tion’ in everyday life, whether it’s daydreaming in a ball pit, on a windy day, while gazing at the night sky or watching the snow fall from the warmth of the indoors, different strokes to different folks. A recurring component in her artwork is the pres- ence of a character who’s seen keeping the main character company. An imaginary best friend, who happens to look like a creature, with whom she shares her personal and private moments; the moments during which she escapes and disconnects.

October 2021
Online Exhibition

Four You Gallery is honoured to present ‘Another kind of Life,’ an exhibition of oil paintings by British born and London-based artist Dannielle Hodson. Her works are rich and fluctuating blends of abstract figures and fleeting ghostly forms. Hierarchies have folded and all characters are vulnerable to one another’s influence, and more forcefully the artists painterly manipulation. Hodson works by revealing and erasing ideas, subjects, and the metaphysical. The result is an exaggerated carnivalesque celebration of painting, interrupted by bulging forms that dizzy and awe-inspire.

Dannielle Hodson is a recent graduate from the Turps Banana studio painting programme. She also holds a BA in Womenswear Fashion design and MA in Fine Art from Central St. Martins. Hodson regards her most recent stint at CSM as one of her greatest experiences, claiming that this was when she really started to understand what she was trying to do with her artwork. Career wise, winning a solo show at Pallant House Gallery was a defining moment.

September 2021
Online Exhibition

Four You Gallery is delighted to present ‘Phenomenology of A Black Woman’, a group exhibition curated by Nomaza Nongqunga Coupez, the first collective show of female African artists that the gallery has hosted to date. ‘Phenomenology of A Black Woman’ features the work of Artists Claire Idera, Damilola Onosowobo, Lesego Seoketsa, and Muofhe Manavhela.

Bringing together an international and multigenerational group of artists, Phenomenology of Black Women provides the viewer an untainted lens through which they can gain an understanding of the interrelationship of race, class, gender, and stratification from the perspectives and the existence of four black female artists living and working in South Africa and Nigeria. The artworks explore the basic internal structure of consciousness and other forms of experience by delivering a platform for black women to look more deeply into their reality and, from that sharing in growing consciousness, a consciousness not only for themselves but the viewers as well.

Drawing from the inspiration and groundbreaking work of Barbara Smith, a black feminist luminary and other Black feminist visionaries of the Combahee River Collective such as Beverly Smith, Demita Frazer, Cheryl Clarke, Akasha Hull, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Chirlane McCray, and Audre Lorde, this exhibition reiterates their famous slogan, “Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free”. This comes from their far-sighted understanding that if Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would be free since the freedom of black women will necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression, from political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as the patriarchy.

August 2021
Online Exhibition

Four You Gallery is delighted to present “Alone, Together and Beyond”, an exhibition of acrylic and oil paintings by New York based artist Uzo Njoku. Njoku was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1996, and moved to the United States at the age of 7. In 2019, she received her bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from the University of Virginia, and is currently an MFA student at the New York Academy of Art. Both an artist and businesswoman, Njoku has already built tremendous success with both her fine art paintings, and commercial product design. Her artworks are in demand and have been collected globally. Njoku has been exhibiting her work since 2017 in both solo and group exhibitions in the US, the UK, and West Africa. She has also been widely published across important publications including Hypebeast, Afropunk, Forbes, and Elle.

Njoku has gained this traction only recently and with sudden haste, her career is firmly on an upward trajectory. The artist was finally able to measure her own achievements when her most recent exhibition ‘Space of My Own’ opened at Voltz Clarke Gallery in New York. There were over 300 people in attendance who had travelled from all over to see the work. Njuko’s work had reached new audience members, yet it was those that had bought her first $20 prints that she was most overwhelmed to see there in support.

“Alone, Together and Beyond” is a confronting and subversive celebration of colour, pattern, and paint. Uzo Njoku has achieved her aim to bond and commend with equal importance, fine art and design.

July 2021
Online Exhibition

Four You Gallery is delighted to present ‘Things like Image. Image like Things.’, an exhibition of paintings by artist So Young Kim. Currently enrolled on the MA Painting Programme at the Royal College of Art, Kim is based between London, Singapore & Korea. She embarked upon her BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Loughborough University in 2013 but has been a practicing artist for 10 years. Kim has been exhibiting since 2011 and notes her participation in group exhibition ‘Cabinet of Curiosity’ (Seoul, Korea, 2018) as one of her greatest experiences as an artist. She engaged in rich curatorial conversations around the work, which have stuck with her and consequently influenced the way she exhibits today. Further, she has had works commissioned and collected in Singapore, and published in Wu Wei Art Magazine and ‘Young Blood’.

This exhibition of paintings will challenge both the mind and body. Much like Kim’s sculptural displacements, the body will feel a certain disarticulation, dizzied by both composition and space. Once stillness has again been re-established, the audience will feel renewed and a sense of the same potential with which they are confronted.

June 2021
Online Exhibition

Four You Gallery is delighted to present ‘It’s All Relative’, a collective exhibition curated by Adele Smejkal and the second collective show the gallery has hosted to date. ‘It’s All Relative’ features the work of Artists Amy Beager, Anna Nero, Isabelle McCormick, Jess Burgess, and Kristy M. Chan.

‘All is relative’ is a famous quote by Albert Einstein describing his general theory of relativity. It means that nothing is absolute and that all is valued or rated in relation to other things. As humans, we develop fears, joys, and curiosities that carry a specific significance or meaning to us, but they might not mean the same thing or anything at all to other people. It all depends on circumstances and points of view. It’s all relative is a group show of five early-career to mid-career women artists whose works explore the vast array of emotions and connections that are absolute to the life of each artist.

The German/Russian artist Anna Nero focuses on the relationships that people develop with objects. Her focus transcends into the topic of fetishism and the absurdity of connections and fixations we adopt to particular objects. Through abstract depictions and various brush strokes, Anna conveys the strange and mystery between humans and things.

Kristy Chan, a London-based artist, was born and raised in Hong Kong. Her upbringing, changes of homes and cultures inspired her to create work reflecting migration and displacement. Kristy’s hand responds differently to different environments, including weather, culture, or even studio space, thus always creating a new take. She describes her abstract hologram-like paintings as ‘stolen realities.

Amy Beager is a British artist who reinvents figurative painting through bold colours and juxtapositions. For her, the fundamental motive is the tension between ecstasy and anguish. Reminiscing on the Renaissance and mythological characters, Amy’s work explores the emotional intensity of love, intimacy, and distress.

Jess Burgess, on the other hand, shifts her focus to contemporary culture. Her collage-like images scattered on canvas display images of women figures, their clothes, accessories, and other details. They are snapshots of our social media-driven society where beauty culture dominates. Jess balances between visual stimulation and cultural mediation.

Similarly, like Jess, the American artist Isabelle McCormick is interested in what it means to live in today’s world of modern technology. Through her practice, Isabelle questions women and their position in the society of beautifying apps, social media, and reality TV. Are women under the scrutiny of the male gaze? Or are we living in the era of the highest freedom of exposure? …… It is all relative.

March 2021
Online Exhibition

Four You Gallery is pleased to present “Coincidental Encounters,” an exhibition of paintings by London based artist Lena Brazin. Born and raised in Slovakia, Brazin was mentored by an established French painter in the South of France from 2010 to 2015, before moving to London a few years ago. Here she enrolled upon an alternative studio based painting programme at the Turps Art School. Since 2016 Brazin has exhibited her work in Greece, following a painting residency period, and extensively in the UK. Notable exhibitions include Royal Academy of Arts 2020, London; “Ancient Deities” Arusha Gallery 2020, the “RA Summer Show 2020” Edinburgh; “FBA Futures 2020” Mall Galleries 2020, London; “Exceptional” graduate art award, Collyer Bristow Gallery 2020, London; “Turps Painters 2019” Turps Gallery 2019, London; “Artist of the Day” Flowers Gallery 2018, London; “Bow Open Show” at Nunnery Gallery 2018, London.

Lena Brazin’s work is in the Soho House Collection and private collections in France, Slovakia, the UK, the US, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Additionally, the artist has been shortlisted for multiple awards including “Jackson’s Painting Prize 2020,” “FBA Futures 2020,” and the “Exceptional” Collyer Bristow Graduate Award, to name a few. “Coincidental Encounters” at Four You gallery is Brazin’s inaugural Solo Exhibition. It is an impressively vibrant show of dynamic and full oil paintings. The artist is determined to let nothing go unseen; she adorns the familiar and gives shape to the metaphysical.

February 2021
Online Exhibition

Four You Gallery is delighted to present ‘QUEEN AUBERGINE’ an exhibition of surreal and compelling oil paintings by Stockholm born and London based artist Sally Kindberg. In 2012, the artist graduated from Goldsmiths University of London, having successfully completed a Fine Art BA and MFA. Thus far, Kindberg has had an impressive creative career and has been celebrated globally. She has exhibited artworks across Europe, in New York and more recently in Seoul. As a consequence of this wide-reaching exposure, Kindberg’s paintings have been collected in Australia, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Netherlands, the UK and the US. Furthermore, she has just received the news of her outstanding success in being selected for the John Moores Painting Prize exhibition, which will take place in 2021.

Sally Kindberg’s paintings are immediately decipherable, yet seductive in their oily sheen. The artist hopes to inflict, however, a second glance or ‘double take’, an optical return to the picture plane. Upon this secondary response, she anticipates the audience might pay further attention to initially overlooked. Kindberg’s paintings are acutely rendered, but the figurative exhibits a teasing tendency towards abstraction. This diffusion aligns with Kindberg’s modest feelings for life and art; she paints with depth and simultaneously encourages the awkward and bathetic, “I am glad the world is clumsy.”

January 2021
Online Exhibition

blues
/bluːz/
feelings of melancholy, sadness, or nostalgia.
“she’s got the blues”
Ex,: “It was a hot summer day in Italy. The last day of that summer and the sun was just setting far away in the sea. A strong feeling came over me. A mixture of sadness and happiness, longing and lost. It was the beginning and yet an end.
I think I had the blues.”

Four You Gallery is pleased to present Blues a Dynamisk Curated exhibition and the very first group exhibition the gallery has hosted to date. Blues is a collective show hosting works from Annabel Faustin, Ania Hobson, Berit Louise Sara Grønn, Cho Hui- Chin and Tilde Grynnerup. The exhibition aims to challenge the traditional concept of blues and instead explore new avenues of meaning beyond the conventional.

Here blues are thought of as a blue haze, where dreams and reality meet and entwine into one. Blues is being melancholic yet nostalgic, it is a feeling of longing, memories and dreams. It is a tipping point between opposites, sanity and insanity, extreme happiness and fatal misery. It is a state in which we feel like we have lost our grip and are falling and yet again we have never felt so alive.

The characters in the exhibition are brave and strong. They are connected with the physical and the spiritual, the outside world and one owns feelings. They are not afraid to show emotion. They are modern day Flâneurs that carefully observe their surroundings and it is how they view life with all its complexities and imperfections that ultimately reflect back upon who they are and what they feel: ‘blue’.

In the abstract works there are instead rich layers of symbolism and meaning, brushstrokes and colors are in a constant flow and seems to be in an eternal conversation. Conveyed through a variety of compositions and motifs, figurative and abstract, the ambiguity of the Blues are deeply rooted in all of the works.

The feeling of blue, is something that we cannot put our finger on but ultimately we can all relate to. Because we are currently in a world, where we have never been so disconnected and yet connected at the same time. It is all a sense of wonder, but what encourage us is to know, that we are after all, not alone.

December 2020
Online Exhibition

Four You Gallery is pleased to present ‘Pandora’s Candy Box’ an exhibition of paintings by London based artist Xu Yang. Earlier this year, Xu graduated with a Painting MA from the Royal College of Art. Previously, the artist excelled at Wimbledon College of Art, attaining a 1st Class BA in 2018. In recent years, Xu Yang has been showered with award nominations and victories, and wide- reaching press coverage. Xu Yang has exhibited her artwork extensively across the UK, China and elsewhere in Europe. Noteworthy shows include ‘100 Carat Diamond:’ this exhibition was awarded to Xu as the recipient of the Barbican Artists Group Trust ArtWorks Open. Xu Yang is also the Vice Chairman of the UK – China Photography Association.

‘Pandora’s Candy Box’ is an exhibition of oil paintings that by nature of the Rococo subvert the classical, and reveal historical social shifts. Xu’s paintings demonstrate the opulent meeting of rich oil paint on textile, and speak to the ‘old masters’ from which she takes inspiration. The artist intends to re-imagine the characteristics of the Rococo style in our contemporary moment. Xu’s painterly reality is sickly-sweet, lavish and time defiant: her paintings could be a product of 18th century Paris, yet sit very comfortably within the context of now in this new digital age.

November 2020
Online Exhibition

Four You Gallery is pleased to present ‘Hide & Seek,’ an exhibition of paintings by Antwerp based artist Heidi Ukkonen. In 2015, she graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts with a Masters degree in Painting. Since then, the artist has exhibited her work in group and solo shows extensively across Antwerp, and more recently in Amsterdam. This year Ukkonen participated in DONTGIVEADAMNS with Marian Cramer Projects. This show, which was curated by Sasha Bogojev, was highly regarded and gained significant success. The artist is also working towards This Art Fair, which will be held in Amsterdam in 2021. Further, she is co-founder of gallery Showhouse JayJay in Antwerp.

Released from the rules of tangible reality, and with an instinctive approach, Heidi Ukkonen creates autonomous paintings that fuse manners of optimism and hopelessness. The paintings in ‘Hide & Seek’ reflect absolutely the anxiety and disruption of now, and the universal feelings imposed in response. A surrealist body of work, the paintings breathe a lived experience. Raw, existential, yet reviving in vibrant colour and haze, Ukkonen’s artworks lead a turbulent journey that she hopes will end with a resounding “everything will be fine” takeaway.

October 2020
Online Exhibition

Four You Gallery is delighted to present ‘Over The Hill,’ an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by New York based artist Camilla Marie Dahl. Prior to her recent graduation from the painting MFA at the New York Academy of Art, Dahl had already achieved exceptional success in her early artistic career. As a recipient of multiple awards, grants and residencies, including the SEE Beyond Award (2015) and Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2019), Dahl’s outstanding ambitions have been supported and facilitated since undergraduate study completion. Her artworks have been shown in exhibitions across the USA since 2015 and most frequently in New York City. Last year, Dahl’s work was auctioned at Sotheby’s New York.

Working across painting and sculpture, Dahl constructs melancholic reflections on the human condition. More specifically, her work addresses humility and innate human desires to control, contain and manipulate the natural world. As articulated by the artist, such yearning tends to implode in failure. The resultant artworks are quiet, philosophical and pensive in their shifting perspectives and rolling landscapes.

September 2020
Online Exhibition

Four You Gallery is pleased to present ‘Through the Seasons,’ an exhibition of acrylic paintings on canvas by Tokyo based artist Ryoko Kaneta. Since graduating from the Yokohama College of Art and Design, she has successfully exhibited her artworks in group and solo shows globally. Kaneta has hosted group exhibition ‘199X’ for almost 10 years, featuring artists born in the 90’s who were surrounded and heavily influenced by Japanese anime and manga, much like her. As well as these more contemporary stimuli, the artist draws brilliance from pre 19th century Japanese paintings. Personification is a theme that appears consistently in the sources she looks to for inspiration, and consequently in Kaneta’s artwork too. The artist uses the universally familiar human form to express ideas and objects of phenomenal abstraction.

Kaneta’s paintings exist as an amalgamation of Japanese cultural histories, ancient and recent. Her artworks meditate on indigenous folklore narratives and the cyclicality of nature’s seasons, both of which are intricately linked. The artist’s homeland and extensive travels to places of natural beauty have significantly informed her paintings. These cultural expansions have infused her artworks with visual wisdom and a clear articulation of emotion. Kaneta seamlessly marries nature and its elements with human feeling through the use of personification. The paintings in ‘Through the Seasons’ are evocative of the emotions inflicted by nature that are often too hard to articulate with words.

August 2020
Online Exhibition

Four You Gallery is pleased to present ‘Door to Door,’ Miki Matsuyama’s inaugural exhibition of paintings. In 2018 Matsuyama graduated from the School of International Liberal Studies at Waseda University in Tokyo and has since embarked on a creative career with aspirations to become an interior designer. This interest has been encouraged by her experience in sales with Sotheby’s real estate, and developed into a keen curiosity about curated space. The artist’s work sits somewhere between fine art and illustration, as she re-imagines in paint images of interiors collected from Instagram and magazines. Matsuyama’s resultant artworks are vibrant and welcoming, immediately transporting the viewer into the reconsidered space.

Having lived in numerous culturally rich cities and spending free time in museums, Matsuyama has been exposed to many realizations of art and architecture. She lists Pierre Yovanovitch as a design influence and Monet and Picasso as some of her artistic inspirations. As well as these outward influences, Matsuyama has been motivated more intimately by her artist grandparents who she joined in their studio from a young age. Her rich cultural history is embedded in the paintings in this exhibition. They are uniquely delicate and somewhat imperfect, as the artist’s trace of hand remains present.

June 2020
Online Exhibition

Four You Gallery is pleased to present artist Gemma Holzer’s first solo exhibition entitled ‘Alone Together’.Californian born Holzer recently graduated with a first class bachelors degree in Fine Art from City & Guilds in London, and has already exhibited works in the Netherlands and the United States. Primarily, her work is a reflection on childhood, the following emergence into adulthood, and life in the post digital age. The artist uses creative tools including autobiographical illustration, references to popular culture and indications to familiar children’s media to demonstrate her philosophies. Holzer paints primarily with brightly coloured oils and acrylics to attain surfaces that mimic digital screens. Her painterly method realises saturated illusions that both absorb and activate dream-like recollections of youth.

‘Alone Together’introduces the fetus-like creature PinkBoy, a self-portrait of Holzer, who remains the subject of the paintings in this exhibition. PinkBoy is reminiscent of familiar cartoon imagery, and exists as an embodiment of Holzer’s childhood experiences. He is placed within the artificial worlds to raise questions and concerns around being human in today’s age, and depicts the artist’s own understanding and navigation of life within it.