Why do you go to the gym? Why do you watch what you eat? What, to impress a potential mate? To live longer and be healthy? Boring.
You should be more like the figures in South Korean artist Hyegyeong Choi’s debut European solo show. They gorge themselves on ice cream, stuff their chubby faces with spaghetti and fish and chicken wings, and they’re having a great time.
Choi paints with a mixture of swirling palette knife precision and big globs of layered acrylic. They’re dreamy, intense, mega-bright, hugely over-exaggerated things. The big-cheeked figures sprawl and lounge in surreal, druggy, Hieronymous Bosch-like landscapes filled with purple suns, orange clouds, mounds of passion fruit, bursts of flowers and growths of penile mushrooms. The washes of colour suck you in, the thick, luscious spots of paint make you want to lick the canvases.
Sack off the diet, cancel your gym membership and lose yourself instead in Choi’s world where Bruegel meets mukbang, it’s a lot more fun.
