Intriguing Neo-Pop Art Sculptures by Quim Tarrida

I’m really digging the neo-pop art work of Barcelona-based Quim Tarrida, whose first exhibition in the U.S. opens tonight at Toy Art Gallery. If You Blink, You’ll Miss It highlights Tarrida’s sculptural work across several mediums: resin, ceramic and fiberglass. Together, the “neo-pop” character-based structures form The Subcutanian World, Tarrida’s personal universe, which he describes as “a microcosm inhabited by strange, metamorphic and viral beings, true anti-heroes on the verge of the uncanny.”

I find Tarrida’s neo-pop art figures very intriguing. For toy collectors, The Sub Sub Family (above) can almost pick up where Mars-1’s metaphysical mini-series, The Invisible Plan (and more recently: this) left off in 2006. There’s also something very appealing about Tarrida’s ceramic overturned troll vase, Relaxing in Blue (below). I bet Toy Art Gallery currently feels like a subversive, subliminal theme park (not unlike Disneyland).

From the press release, written by Jordi Costa:

His discourse searches, among the forms of popular culture, for those nodes of tension which can allow us to challenge a present where the all-powerful violence has [been] hidden behind the mask of kindness, of what is apparently innocuous. In short, of what is seductive….Quim Tarrida’s gaze deciphers the buried blood circuits of violence in an anti-Utopian reality which has sophisticated its mechanisms of control until disguising itself as a fantasy at the service of the user.

If You Blink, You Miss It opens tonight, Friday, December 9th and runs through December 30th at Toy Art Gallery’s new showroom located at 7571 Melrose Ave. Hollywood CA 90046.