مجموعة: Lhouette | Pop Art & Mixed Media
Lhouette is a British artist whose practice brings together the visual culture of the 1980s and 90s, the iconography of global consumer brands, and the digital landscape of contemporary social media in works of considerable material complexity and immediate cultural intelligence. After leaving the Royal Navy in his early twenties — a period spent abroad that gave him, as he describes it, an alternative view on consumer culture, watching familiar brands and products look completely different through the lens of another country's visual environment — he discovered East London's pop-up exhibition scene and rediscovered a passion for art that has driven his practice ever since.
He studied at Birkbeck University of London before establishing his own studio in 2012, and has spent the decade since honing a technique of unusual material richness: aerosol paints, high pigment heavy body acrylics, resins, metallic gilds, and diamond dust, combined with stencils, collage, and hand painting in works that build from a single imaginative idea through digital design and physical execution into finished pieces of genuine visual complexity. His personal nostalgia for the 80s and 90s — the retro aesthetic, the comic book characters, the vintage design and iconic figures — is placed in deliberate juxtaposition with the digitised symbols of contemporary life: social media icons, streaming service logos, smartphone interface elements, the visual language of the present in collision with the visual memory of the past.
His international references are specific and earned: old Japanese Superman manga titles, Coca-Cola branding in Slavic script, bootleg products, foreign food packaging — the specific experience of consumer culture seen from outside, which his Navy years made possible and which gives his work a cosmopolitan range that purely domestic experience cannot produce.
His work has sold at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Bonhams. His collectors include Antonio Banderas, Tim Burton, Ronan and Storm Keating, Adrian Newey OBE, and The Dorchester Collection. His 2017 residency at 45 Park Lane — 30 works, all sold — was among the most commercially successful single-artist residencies of that year. His charitable work has raised tens of thousands of pounds for Unicef, Cancer Research, and the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM). Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.