Original artwork

Edition 1 of

Airbrush on repurposed London bus panel

50.5 x 73cm

In her first British solo show, Canadian artist Christina Allan (b. 1995) is showing 13 original works upon London bus panels.

Allan, known for her dramatic airbrushed paintings received her BFA in Painting from Parsons the New School for Design in 2017. The artist’s skeletal paintings loom over the gallery space; like phosphorescent creatures on the seafloor, her characters haunt into focus or descend from another universe. Her mastery of the airbrush, a tool atypically used to create far-fetched tones and gradients, allows her to explore the nightmarish imagery of life and death, space and machinery. The vibrancy of her work calls upon very little reference and feels entirely fresh and often against the grain of contemporary aesthetics.

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.

We are thrilled to be able to work with Christina Allan and as always the proceeds of our collaboration will go towards the benefit of London's disadvantaged communities.