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.