The hottest name in urban art makes his UK gallery debut at The Outsiders Newcastle this winter. DALeast presents the solo exhibition Redok.

Redok features six large facial portraits of animals all painted in DALeastʼs compelling, instantly recognisable form. The canvases will be supplemented by a series of sketched studies, a film installation, and print editions created by DALeast at The Outsidersʼ dedicated Execution Dock studio. Redok is phonetic English for a Tibetan expression compounding its words for hope and fear. Says the fêted young artist, “As I heard, these two emotions rule lives, generating temporary happiness and suffering. Itʼs the story for all creatures.”

The works use ink and acrylics paint. In signature DALeast style, their subjects are assembled from countless intertwined, writhing strokes resembling twisted shards of some undiscovered, jet-black molten metal. The artist says this represents a union of experience: not just his own, but the combined, chaotic effect of all the worldliness and significance possessed by anyone, and anything, heʼs interacted with. They boast the tea-stained abstract backgrounds, painstakingly layered and dried over many months, which have also come to define DALeastʼs gallery pieces.

The creatures depicted are imperious and heroic, yet tinged with melancholy. Like the subjects of commissioned historical portraits, they seem somewhat heroic: in their prime, yet already bearing the spiritual scars of a life well lived.

Despite the name Redok and its Oriental, spiritual connotations DALeast shies away from the label of Chinese Artist. He says, “Nationality is restricting as an artist. I am not exclusively Chinese, but as ordinary humans we could emotionally be an animal, or even a ghost. When I am painting, I try to examine these other states of being.”

Whilst he hardly deals purely in animistic themes, DAL says of the bestial portraits in Redok: “My intention is to represent powerful human emotions, and stories, with animals and objects.” Depicted by DALeastʼs brushes, a zeppelin airship induces simultaneous feelings of liberation and hubris, achievement and isolation; and a rocketeer, both fear of failure and exhilaration. He also toys with the notion of cybernetic organisms, giving his animal antagonists wheels for paws, or returning to the theme of augmented man, be he a scuba diver or astronaut.

But what has marked this 29 year-old out for greatness is his worksʼ poetry of expression, its dynamism and drama. His beautifully observed forms echo those apt poises of the 19th centuryʼs figurative masters, and his mini-narratives the best-loved representational art.

Redok by DALeast: undoubtedly one of the most anticipated urban art exhibitions of 2013.

The Outsiders Gallery
77 Quayside
Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 3DE United Kingdom
Ph. +44 (0)19 12212560
info@theoutsiders.net
www.theoutsiders.net

Opening hours
Tuesday - Saturday
From 12pm to 6pm