Details
Description
The artwork features a large, black leather recliner chair set against a vibrant red background. The chair's design is visually striking, with a tufted pattern covering its entire surface, creating a striking, geometric effect. The chair appears luxurious and inviting, yet its monochromatic color scheme and angular design give it a distinctly contemporary and minimalist aesthetic. The artist's use of negative space and bold colors highlights the chair's form and materiality, inviting the viewer to consider the relationship between function and art. The artwork likely reflects the artist's exploration of the interplay between utility and artistic expression in modern design. ...
Similar Artworks
Michael Thompson (b. 1997, London, Ontario) is a painter living and working in Toronto. Thompson’s paintings connect the evolution of the image — from early darkroom photography through contemporary digital imaging — to the shifting labour conditions across the 20th and 21st century. Rooted in Thompson’s experience at Ford Motor Company where his father and two grandfathers worked before him, he paints from found images wrought with a nostalgic yearning for the handmade and the aesthetics of manual labour more broadly. Thompson positions this nostalgia as an ever-present condition of the alienated worker, now further disconnected from their efforts through the increasing implementation of automation and artificial intelligence in the workplace. Working within a compositional structure that often references the filmstrip, Thompson explores imagistic analogues for the shifting conditions of the image in modernity, a focus which has seen the artist reference iconic American imagery of the Space Race and the figure of Elvis Presley. Thompson’s painted subjects are fractured and stuck between images of a recent past that can never be relived and the inexhaustible drive toward efficient, productive workplaces aided by the latest technologies. In 2019, Thompson completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Western University and became a resident artist at the Slade School of Fine Art in partnership with Camden Art Centre (London). In 2022, he received a Master of Fine Art from the University of Guelph. The artist has been included in exhibitions in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. His first solo exhibition, Chorus Coda, opened at Franz Kaka (Toronto) in 2023. Thompson is included in Greater Toronto Art 2024 at MOCA, Toronto, the artist’s first institutional presentation. ...
Michael Thompson: Artworks
Franz Kaka was founded in 2016 as an artist-led gallery, presenting exhibitions that privileged experimentation and risk-taking. In 2019, the gallery began formally representing a number of the artists who had previously exhibited, including Lotus L. Kang, HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander, Anne Low, and Elif Saydam. In the years since, the gallery has expanded its international reach through gallery collaborations and art fair participations, including presentations at Art Basel, Frieze London, and the Armory Show. Known for presenting materially curious and conceptually complex exhibitions, the gallery champions nuanced practices that transform and deepen through sustained engagement, fostering dynamic conversations with audiences in Toronto and abroad. ...