1 - 19 December 2020

Unit London

IRL

Group Exhibition

In IRL, a generational and international group of artists address an impending, yet obscure future. During these unparalleled times of isolation and remoteness, our very definition of the term ‘IRL’ can no longer unequivocally differentiate between our physical reality and our digital reality.

In response to an uncertain world, the works presented in IRL manifest as disquietingly surrealist spaces that are brimming with fantastical and mystical elements. Any apprehension about the unknown is juxtaposed with a creative curiosity as these artists explore uncharted territory. As we internationally attempt to realise a ‘new-normal’, this group of artists strives towards innovative methods of representation to describe an ever-changing global landscape.

Artists

IRL Featured Artists

Amadeo Morelos

Amadeo Morelos, born in 1992 in Morelia, Mexico, graduated in 2016 with a BFA from The Art Institute of Chicago. Morelos is a multidisciplinary artist whose works draw visually from both Greek mythology and bodybuilding culture. He creates disproportionate and fantastical figures that undulate before the viewer with a remarkable kinetic energy. Currently, Morelos is working towards his MFA at Columbia University in New York City.

Seungcheol Ok

Seungcheol Ok was born in 1988 in Seoul, South Korea. The artist’s works are deconstructions and reimaginations of images of cartoon characters. Aokizy transforms these well-known images into unique digital art pieces that exist in our world, outside the cartoon virtual reality in which we typically encounter them. His works expand on the notion of appropriation to question ideas of artistic authority and originality.

Christopher Hartmann

Christopher Hartmann was born in Germany in 1993 and currently works and resides in London. Hartmann holds an MA from Central Saint Martins and recently undertook an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University in London. Hartmann is specifically interested in the human form and all the emotional aspects that are tied to it. His work addresses deeply nuanced relationships that are shaped by both isolation and closeness, attachment and detachment.

Dominic Chambers

Dominic Chambers was born in 1993 in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design before going on to undertake an MFA at the Yale University School of Art. Chambers’ large-scale paintings and drawings reference literary narratives, mythologies and African American histories. His works present imagined landscapes while subtly examining moments of meditation and introspection through depictions of reading and leisure.

Dominic Dispirito

Born in 1982 in London, Dominic Dispirito earned his BFA from Middlesex University in 2013 and an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2017. His paintings and sculptures may at first appear simplistic with their slightly caricaturised scenes and figures. On closer observation, his works reveal themselves as subtle and witty celebrations of the British working-class experience. Dispirito’s simplicity of line and colour invites viewers to reflect on the nature of society from both an individual and universal perspective.

Fabien Adele

Born in 1993, Fabien Adèle is a French artist based in Paris. In 2019, he received his master’s degree from Paris Sorbonne University. Adèle’s paintings are strongly influenced by Surrealism and focus on the representation of memories and sensation. His figures appear as statuesque reflections of the environments that surround them. However static they may seem, Adèle’s figures always convey a sense of introspection; they are absorbed in moments of profound contemplation.

Isaac Mann

Isaac Mann was born in 1986 in Saint Paul Minnesota and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. He holds an MFA from The New York Academy of Art and a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Mann’s works play with convention, conveying frenzied and surrealist scenes of entangled figures. These curious compositions are innately uncertain, deriving mostly from memory and fantasy. Mann’s works demand the viewer to look twice to uncover details, motives and identities.

Jeremy Olson

Born in 1976 in Ojai, California, Jeremy Olson is a Brooklyn-based artist working in painting, sculpture and video. He received his BFA from the University of Arizona and an MFA from New York University. Largely inspired by Cubism, Olson’s compositions are evocative renderings of universal anxieties. His practices are thematically linked by a consistent interest in how images can shape desire and how they can either constrain or expand possibilities.

Karen Seapker

Karen Seapker is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee. She received her MFA in 2009 from Hunter College in New York City. Her energetic and expressive style is enhanced by an intensely vivid colour palette. Seapker’s ethereal paintings and works on paper represent highly abstracted scenes that address the complexity of human relationships, the natural world and the broad passage of time itself.

Laura Krifka

Laura Krifka was born in 1985 in Los Angeles and currently lives and works in San Luis Obispo, California. In 2010, she received an MFA from UC Santa Barbara. Krifka’s artworks are meticulously assembled figurative compositions that confront notions of power and identity. Krifka combines different visual dialogues found in art history, film and photography to create surreal and intensely psychological portraits.

Lee Simmonds

Lee Simmonds is a British contemporary fine artist who lives and works in Bracknell, Berkshire. Simmonds graduated with a BFA and First Class Honours from the University of Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. Simmonds is drawn to representations of the everyday and his artworks largely address the experience of suburban living. However, his works frequently elude simplistic interpretation by twisting the mundane through sardonicism and absurdism.

Megan Ellen MacDonald

Megan Ellen MacDonald, born in 1990, is a Canadian artist currently based in Toronto. She graduated from Ontario College of Art and Design with a BFA in 2013 and has exhibited widely in Canada and the US. Her paintings are striking appropriations of romantic and baroque themes. By confronting this circumscribed aesthetic hierarchy, Macdonald’s still life arrangements challenge how we perceive the cultural value of objects typically considered feminine or ‘kitsch.’

Natalie Wadlington

Born in 1992 in Modesto, California, Natalie Wadlington is an artist currently based in East Texas. In 2020, she completed her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art and was a resident fellow at the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency. Her figurative paintings frequently feature animals and are largely based in the traditions of storytelling. Wadlington’s artworks employ distinct metaphors to convey broader themes of love, conflict and misunderstandings.

Nettle Grellier

Nettle Grellier currently lives and works in Stroud, in the UK, where she was born in 1993. After graduating from the University of Brighton in 2015, Nettle lived and exhibited in Barcelona and Granada in Spain. Her artworks address the notion of tenderness by frequently depicting close friendships and affectionate relationships. Through her work, Grellier wishes to encourage a communal spirit of unity, kindness and support.

Ry David Bradley

Ry David Bradley was born in Australia in 1979 and graduated with an MFA from Melbourne University in 2013. Bradley is known as one of the leading artists exploring the intersection between technology and the contemporary art world. In 2009, Bradley founded the popular website PAINTED, ETC. which studies the impact of technology and digital imagery on the nature of art today. His work examines the meaning of painting in a world where the boundaries between the physical and the virtual are becoming increasingly blurred.

Sholto Blissett

Sholto Blissett was born in 1996 in Salisbury in the UK. He attended The University of Durham where he received a degree in Geography before undertaking an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art. He paints large-scale oil on canvas works that represent imagined landscapes. Blissett’s paintings are heavily influenced by the German Romantics, blending the Sublime with the surreal. The subject matter is reminiscent of science fiction while still remaining uncannily familiar.

Youada

Youada is a contemporary artist who was born in China in 1987. Youada’s work has been predominantly inspired by the Young British Artists and the culture of 1990s Britain. His artworks constantly deploy technological iconography in order to blur the distinction between the virtual world and the physical world. Youada’s work is full of pop cultural references, recording and documenting the changing trends of contemporary life.

This is a new world in which human connection has become progressively lacking and longed for.

Our encounters with others are now frequently mitigated by digital spheres. Many of these works examine how technology interlocks with our physical world by incorporating digital and pop cultural iconography to investigate the impact of virtual imagery on artistic imagery. IRL indicates the contemporary issue of extracting reality from the imagined, idealised and romanticised images that confront us in the continually developing cosmos of online media.

In these strange times of lockdowns and social distance, these boundaries between the material universe and the virtual universe have become increasingly blurred. Through the use of heightened abstraction and the surreal, the works presented in IRL directly address this modern phenomenon by indicating the difficulty of separating ‘real’ life from mediated experiences.

These artists have been able to reach a striking equilibrium; their artworks may render abstract figures, otherworldly scenes and imagined landscapes, but they remain intuitively familiar to us.

These works engage with universal concepts of memory, time, identities and human relationships through a highly surrealist visual language. IRL then presents a selection of artworks that enter into an uncanny territory; elements of reality are offered to us, yet something remains different and unsettling. IRL is therefore an exhibition that is able to exist concurrently on two planes. The show simultaneously inhabits two realms, collapsing the barriers between the online and the offline, the physical and the virtual, the real and the surreal.