Brad DONOVAN

Brad Donovan paints the moment a cartoon wanders into an old master. Round-eyed characters, the kind he traced against his bedroom window as a kid, sit inside compositions borrowed from the Baroque, sweetness and unease sharing every canvas. Born in 1990 on the North Island of New Zealand and largely self-taught, he grew up rural, painting scrap wood with his father's workshop tools, and now shows internationally, from London to Taipei, Seoul, and Singapore. He leaves the narrative to the viewer: one painting all joy, the next all tension, and the difference deliberately hard to name.