Slinkachu New Show | Andipa Gallery London

Slinkachu New Show

If you’re in London this March you’ve got a great opportunity to see a major exhibition by Slinkachu at the Andipa Gallery.

Miniaturesque, a major new exhibition by Slinkachu, will launch at Andipa Gallery on 12th March 2015.  Shot in London during different seasons over the past year, Slinkachu’s new body of work draws upon our desire to seek out and recreate the natural world amongst the urban metropolis.  His miniature people, photographed on the streets of London and then left in situ – or “abandoned” – by the artist, explore the hidden enclaves of the wild within our city.  Slinkachu captures idyllic glades and green pastures, in reality weeds and moss that appear through cracks in the concrete, and comment on our modern society’s detachment from nature.

Using tropes from art and popular culture, Slinkachu’s new works employ irony, humour and a healthy dose of reality; despite their fantastical situations, the miniature figures we observe are not so dissimilar to ourselves, living in the shadows between the real and artificial.

In The Glade a tiny lady sits on a matchstick swing hung from an over-arching weed, a scene reminiscent of The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard and almost, but not quite, picturesque.  In Paradise, Slinkachu has one miniature figure exploring a tropical waterfall worthy of an office motivational poster, if not for the discarded Sprite bottle that causes this ‘un-natural wonder’.  In The Jetty, children frolic in a lake of melting ice-lolly, bringing to mind nostalgia for those long summer days of our youth – or perhaps a scene from a film we once saw, showing what our youth should have been.

Miniaturesque will feature seventeen new images on paper and aluminium as well as new sculptural pieces, one of which is Slinkachu’s biggest yet featuring over 200 miniature figures in a recreation of The River Thames.

Show runs from March 13th – 11th April | See the website here

Here are some of the pieces you can see at the Andipa Gallery this March.

A little bit about the artist himself –

Slinkachu (b. 1979) has been “abandoning” his miniature people on the streets of cities around the world since 2006.  His work embodies elements of street art, sculpture, installation art and photography and has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world.  His work is a familiar and much beloved fixture online too and he is widely credited with re-kindling the popular fascination with miniature art.  His Facebook page currently has nearly 70,000 fans.  His images have been collected in three best-selling art books; Little People in the City (Boxtree, 2009), Big Bad City (Lebowski, 2010) and Global Model Village (Boxtree, 2012) that have collectively sold over 300,000 copies worldwide.  His large-format photography has been published by Andipa Gallery since 2008, where it has attracted the attention of art collectors around the globe.

Here are a few past examples of his unique work –