"Softee"

Original artwork

Edition 1 of 1

Airbrush on reused London bus panel

56.5 x 55cm

Canadian Artist Christina Allan, known for her dramatic airbrushed paintings, received her BFA in Painting from Parsons the New School for Design in 2017. At the heart of her fantastic and existential paintings is a deep societal anxiety in which her characters often mirror themselves, staring down the barrel of nothingness. Allan's paintings explore the work of existential philosophers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre while using ancient mythology to represent ingrained experiences on the human psyche.

She sees her work as being akin to the ways in which mythic beings provided answers to the unexplainable mysteries of existence; love, death, fear, and conflict can be faced subconsciously in the therapeutic escape of making. The state presented in Christina Allan's paintings is a testament to the inexplicable and man's perpetual pursuit of the infinite. She is based in Toronto, Canada and her work can be found in collections across North America and Europe.

“As humans, there is an innate curiosity and overwhelming desire to understand things we can’t possibly comprehend, things that are beyond us. Naturally, we create our own realities or stories of what exists as methods to make sense of a universe so profoundly complex, to ease the absurdity that we experience in the face of the unknown. As an artist, my work relays both a personal need to fully grasp the world and universe I was born into, paralleled with the acceptance that I never will.”