Ryan Driscoll

Ryan Driscoll’s portraits – inspired just as much by modern photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Dora Maar as they are by painters like Rossetti and Bronzino – co-opt Late Renaissance painting techniques and compositions to explore queered perceptions of beauty, love and death. Queer experience is communicated through Driscoll’s uses of the rich symbolic language and intertextuality found in Mannerism painting, in which every element and object holds great significance and allegory. His work also invokes Greek and Roman mythology, melodrama and fantasy to subvert fixed notions of gender. In his paintings, predominantly crafted with oil on wooden board and using himself as a life model, represent androgynous, fluid figures who are able to assert both tenderness, fragility and power. ...

Founded in 2018 by Antonia Marsh, Soft Opening presents UK-based and international emerging contemporary artists, and often their first solo presentations in London. Focusing on work pushing the conventional limits of medium or material, the gallery presents a wide range of media and practices. Soft Opening built its early program with projects that responded to the gallery’s unique first location in Piccadilly Circus Underground Station. Opening a second space in East London in 2019 saw programming strategy develop as Soft Opening began participating in international art fairs and representing artists. Programming is now focused at this East London space. In 2020 the gallery began publishing artist monographs - the first was with Tenant of Culture in 2020 followed by Gina Fischli in 2021 and Sin Wai Kin in 2022. ...