Starting this week, and over the next month, the extremely talented Austrian artist Nychos has his debut solo show – called IKON – at New York’s Jonathan LeVine Gallery.
Nychos is a street artist, illustrator and painter whose signature style fuses themes of morbid corporality with a colorful and extravagant aesthetic. Inspired by comics, heavy metal, graffiti and his upbringing in a traditional Viennese hunting family, his work reveals the skeletal and internal structure of cartoon characters. With impeccable attention to detail, Nychos implements methods of “dissection, cross-section, fusion and translucency” to juxtapose the beauty and grotesque nature of the body.
For IKON, Nychos has created a series of portraits of celebrities and fictional characters whose images are engraved in our minds and we have become accustomed to perceiving them superficially. With a particular focus on 1980s icons, this new body of work showcases the profound influence media had on the artist during his formative years. By dismantling their anatomy, she explores the humanity that exists under the guise of celebrity and confronts viewers with the most basic thing we all have in common: flesh and blood.
This new series of works explores the evolution of pop culture while also commenting on the developments that have plagued society in recent decades. Visitors will be confronted with images such as a rubber ducky liquefying in polluted water, a Barbie doll whose face has melted into a cancerous drip, and other socio-ecological crises.
The text above was taken from the Gallery’s website.
For more information on Nychos:
