Berlin-based Mongolian artist known as “GAMA” paints imaginary places that look like something out of a surreal stage production. Some of his large-scale paintings bring nature indoors, into checkered rooms rendered with a warped perspective. Other times, we find his characters dwarfed by towering mushrooms and massive icebergs that overlook rustic scenes. In GAMA’s series “Idylls of the Kings”, which debuted earlier this year in Beijing, animals and fairytale creatures appear small in comparison to their strange surroundings. GAMA was raised in a traditional nomadic family in Mongolia, of which his grandmother was a shaman. We can sense her influence in his taste for fantastic images, such as gnome-like characters peeking under particularly whimsical mushrooms in the middle of a large, empty room. Their tiny scale is GAMA’s way of suggesting feelings of smallness and loneliness in the world. He is currently exhibiting “Idylls of the Kings”, with the addition of new paintings and sculptures, for the first time in the United States at Chambers Fine Art in New York.
Painter