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.