Spanish artist, David Oliver, known as Grip Face, and South Korean artist Miju Lee, known for exploring human emotion, have announced their first exhibition in Paris. Taking inspiration from science fiction, manga, and anime as well as the underground art of the 1990s in the United States, their worlds are a rush towards post-humanism with works that are inhabited by avatars, and take on themes of gender, identity, and digital anxiety.
Opening at Galerie Joseph, Find an Offline Shelter presents a series of new creations resulting from their collaborative residency in Majorca supported by the Colección SOLO (Madrid) and La BIBI gallery (Palma de Mallorca). This also marks the first time both Grip Face and Miju Lee have collaborated. In this haven of tranquility, sun, and solitude during the residency, the two artists bonded over their questions about the visual saturation of our daily lives. This period of emotional and physical residency was an opportunity to learn from each other and create together. The exhibition reveals the intellectual, human, and cultural encounters of these two artists with shared interests.
Find an Offline Shelter reflects a society with a thousand and one disguises, including a community of yetis that takes over the exhibition space seemingly charged with caring and sympathy. Situated between the poetic and the political, their works reveal communities of gender-neutral avatars evolving among a multitude of beings reflecting a society that is changing biologically, and whose advanced technologies increase the individual’s ability to transform themselves, to become mutants, plurals.
Slowing down, listening, questioning, disconnecting: the works created for the occasion are the result of long conversations carried out by the two artists over the past few months, taking us into a whirlwind of images and forms, trying to lay bare the fears, doubts, and expectations of a generation affected by the digitalization of the world.
Grip Face & Miju Lee
F.A.O.S – Find an offline shelter
12 to 22 May 2023 at Joseph Gallery
7 Rue Froissart
75003 Paris
Photo credits © GRIMALT DE BLANCH
About LA BIBI Gallery: The contemporary art gallery was founded in 2021, dedicated to showcasing contemporary art across a variety of media and genres and the representation of its artists. In addition to its exhibition program in its headquarters in Mallorca, the gallery also organizes international pop-up exhibitions that bring its innovative programming to unexpected locations worldwide, offering a unique platform to connect with a global audience and contribute to the ongoing dialogue of contemporary art. The gallery program, in 2023 LA BIBI Gallery opened an artist residency to keep supporting artists from around the globe to develop thought-provoking ideas and projects.
About Colección SOLO: An international art project based in Madrid, the collection currently holds almost 900 works, and the Espacio SOLO Museum form the pillars of this creative endeavor begun over 7 years ago by the Spanish entrepreneurs Ana Gervás and David Cantolla, spotlighting the wealth of connections that exist through time and across geographies between different creative, cultural and aesthetic trends. With holdings that range from figurative painting to kinetic sculpture, from pop surrealism to new media and AI-art, Colección SOLO brings together over 180 artists from an ever-growing diversity of countries and artistic backgrounds.
