Tristan Pigott paints “real contemporaries” in upcoming solo exhibition, Juicy Bits

Tristan Pigott’s highly detailed oil paintings have already gained the artist a keen following. Clearly because of his immense skill with a paintbrush but also because Tristan paints relatable content. He creates fine art that isn’t over intellectualised, which is what makes it so intelligent.

The artist is currently preparing for Juicy Bits, his latest solo exhibition at Cob Gallery, London. “The kind of people that Tristan Pigott depicts are our real contemporaries,” explains the gallery. “People who are attuned to the way that self-image is constantly chopped up, repackaged and beamed back to us through the wires and lenses of modern culture; the way that identity is always on exhibition, long before artists get involved.”

The exhibition sees Tristan “experiment with the theme of nature morte, or, literally, dead life, through the form of imaginative multi-media work, combining painting with time-lapse and 3D-printed sculpture”. Each of these counterparts will be installed in a setting resembling a living room, continuing the artist’s concept of “shifting the mundane into the arrestingly peculiar”.

Social media, how we use it and its effects, also plays a key part within the artist’s narrative. For instance in one piece, Fake Plastic Flowers, “where the main subject nervously picks her teeth and she contemplates whether or not she should take the easy road and purchase the mass-produced plastic flowers online, as opposed to committing her time and energy to the unique real thing”.

The artist also plans to create a painting a day during the show providing “a final example of his highly developed fusion of playfulness and cynicism,” says Cob Gallery. “Adapting Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical 1925 novel Heart of A Dog to contemporary discussions about the creative industries, Pigott ironises the apparently contradictory demand placed on artists to be reliable producers of the unexpected.”

Juicy Bits will be open from 8 June to 1 July 2017.