Strychnin Gallery

STRYCHNIN is a playground for artists from all around the globe, a place where collaboration is encouraged, new projects are constantly developed and creativity is the one and only thing that truly counts.

Over the years STRYCHNIN has successfully participated in several major European art fairs such as Liste Cologne, Art.Fair 21 and BLOOOM in Cologne, SCOPE  Basel, Kunstsalon Berlin, Bridge Art Fair in London, Artief in Diest, Fusion 5 Festival in Cannes, Red Bull Fashion week in NYC and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome making quite an impression on collectors, curators, journalists and visitors alike.

Owned by curator Yasha Young, STRYCHNIN remains dedicated to presenting emerging American, Canadian and Japanese artists to the European art world and vice versa. With a steady flow of shows opening worldwide STRYCHNIN features a variety of artists with particular individual styles rather than artists belonging to a collective "hip" movement. If you need to put a label on them though, try lowbrow turned highbrow, pop surrealism or fantastic realism among others.

The gallery was founded in Brooklyn in 1998 and opened a European showroom in Berlin in 2002 and continues to host pop up shows through the galleries very own art agency in NYC, London and many other cities all over the world. Furthermore, STRYCHNIN and its agency successfully publish books, CD covers and also collaborate with a UK based porcelain manufacturer, spearheading the Renaissance of English ceramics.

Ranging from painting to sculpture, photography to doll-making, STRYCHNIN seeks out the extraordinary and the unique: the beautiful, the sublime, the grotesque,  the peculiar and the comical. Featured works are suffused by popular culture - comics, TV, fantasy, contemporary cinema, science fiction, Google, film noir - making them highly accessible, yet they are also inspired by “high art", paying homage to the Baroque, the medieval hagiography or the Renaissance, blurring distinctions and pre-existing notions, resulting in contradictions that cannot easily be resolved. The works are finally more about a personal feeling than a universal claim. What is the viewer to make of a surreal, fantastic illustration done in silverpoint? Far from presenting a mere random selection of purely referential works, however, STRYCHNIN chooses to cherish the individual, both artist and viewer, and to thrive on the contradictions we all carry within us.

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