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On View: Gosha Levochkin and Devin Liston at Soze Gallery

Artist duo Gosha Levochkin and Devin Liston have made a name for themselves as DevNgosha, combining their backgrounds in illustration and fine art. Years after their first collaboration, Soze Gallery is showcasing their individual talents in side by side solos "GROWN UPS" and "LOST" (previewed here). As collaborators, they've come up with a system of working together and creating, where one starts a piece and the other finishes it, and vice versa. Now abandoning that system, we can see Liston and Gosha are artists who like to play with varying aesthetics.

Artist duo Gosha Levochkin and Devin Liston have made a name for themselves as DevNgosha, combining their backgrounds in illustration and fine art. Years after their first collaboration, Soze Gallery is showcasing their individual talents in side by side solos “GROWN UPS” and “LOST” (previewed here). As collaborators, they’ve come up with a system of working together and creating, where one starts a piece and the other finishes it, and vice versa. Now abandoning that system, we can see Liston and Gosha are artists who like to play with varying aesthetics. They blur any lines between them with their shared sense of humor and candy-colored palette.

“GROWN UPS” by Liston offers unsettling watercolor and gouache portaits that play with typography. He splits his freakish ‘adult’ subjects in two with offensive interruptions; “Shut”, “Fuck”, “Up” and “Repeat”, to name a few. They represent his views about life, birth and rebirth, and death. Gosha, on the other hand, take us back to our childhood where we had imaginary friends of every shape and size. Titled “LOST”, his trippy drawings depict insect and bird-like characters. As if we’re following some abstract cycle of life, we go from these wriggly creatures to highschool. He takes a left turn into an Anime-inspired dimension with his highschool portrait “I Got Hoes in Different Area Codes”, starring Yubaba from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. These extreme turns in styles emphasize his feeling “lost”, something many artists go through in their developmental process. Overall, the show’s style is their own self-described “Neo-Psychedelia”, combining moments of playfulness and rebellion.

New works by Gosha Levochkin and Devin Liston are now on view at Soze Gallery through October 2nd.

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The sparkling and sweet demeanor of Japanese artist Hikari Shimoda's child subjects is equally enchanting and disarming, and full of possibilities. Born and currently based in Nagano, Japan, but raised on Japanese animation and comics, Hikari herself is not unlike her characters, living on the edge between a place deeply rooted in its beliefs and traditions and an exciting, however uncertain, future. First featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 29, and also on our blog, her works in recent years have been deeply impacted by the Great East Japan Earthquake, created from the perspective of a young artist living in the countryside, where social media and the books she reads are her main portal to the outside world.
On Friday, September 12th, Soze Gallery will host double solo exhibitions by Los Angeles based Devin Liston and Gosha Levochkin (of DevNGosha, covered here). Titled "GROWN UPS" and "LOST" respectively, the event celebrates their first time exhibiting together since 2012- and highlights their unique dialogue as collaborators. Together, the two artists create a subtle dichotomy by focusing on two parts of a combined expression. We take a look after the jump.
Artist Devin Liston, perhaps best known as one half of the duo devNgosha, featured here, is recently aiming towards a singular voice. His new body of work, debuting at Los Angeles' KP PROJECTS/MK gallery this weekend, represents a different direction for the artist who up to this point has mostly worked with collectives. Within the series, titled "Department of Water & Power", Liston’s portraits of friends and more figurative characters merge detailed realism with expressive brushstrokes and dabs of vibrant color. We caught up with him recently in his Los Angeles studio as he was putting in the final touches.
Gosha Levochkin’s fanciful, strange worlds, often rendered in watercolor and gouache, carry an undercurrent of autobiography for the artist. The artist says “these mediums gives me the freedom to work with mistakes. I love the transparent feel that watercolor gives me and I love the opacity that gouache provides, over all making my work look like animation.” He was last featured on HiFructose.com as a solo artist here.

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