Death Of Marat

The gallery which I visited is the Juxtapoz x Superflat show located at the Vancouver Art Gallery. This exhibition is at the third floor of the building. Due to the theme and the style of Juxtapoz magazine is pop surrealist, which partly how the superflat culture, the influence of “flatness” of Japanese manga and anime culture.

For the word pop surrealist, the first thing comes to my mind is paintings with vivid colours and odd images. This exhibition is trying to include multi-media to deliver the most strange and surreal element of art.

According to the gallery introduction of Juxtapoz, the magazine about the fusion of pop art and surrealist elements into a new catagory of art. Moreover, when having the crossover with superflat work
I like the placement of the fake dead body since it provides a shocking effect to the viewer. behind the Death of Marat, there is a drawing of Kim Jung Gi Legend of Kyoto, and the five ceramic piece by Yuji Ueda, which is like creating a sense of witnessing the “death” of Ai Wei Wei.

One work during my journey of this exhibition, Geoff Mcfetridge’s Bearspaw 2016 is slightly disconnecting from the theme of superflat and pop surrealist. This abstract piece is like out of nowhere and suddenly appear on the show. I have some trouble to connect this piece to the exhibition topic.

For this exhibition, I can see that the curator is trying to break away the white cube by including large graffiti on canvas to the whole wall and large mural to create a sense of pop surrealist world view for this exhibition. However, I think the white wall is washing away the sense of magical and whimpsical of the exhibition. If the show is without the animation, the exhibition would get less atmospheric experience of entering the world of pop surrealist and become the showcase of work with pop surrealist