Babes in Spookyland - the bizarre contemporary pop art by Ciou

New York City , Amsterdam (KochxBos gallery, read our post), Paris, Barcelona, Brussels, California, Portland, Rome, Berlin, and a solo show at Seattle´s Roq La Rue: The unapologetical artist Ciou from Toulouse, France, made them all singing her highest praises. As from now the Last Junkies On Earth also do, how does it come?

In her paintings and drawings, drawn on a base of vintage papers she found in old sheets of music, medical books or dictionaries, Ciou reproduces a whole set of post-modern codes and neo-classical elements. Punkrock, Baroque, Art Nouveau, traditional tattoo, Comic, Japanese culture and Gothic are just some main elements she uses to bring up her highly skilled dark and sweet fairytales. Ciou developed the innocent highschool journal scrawls of teen-goth-girls and pre-emo-kids into a fascinating post-Tim-Burton-wonderland. Her paintings and drawings are highly detailed structures filled vibrantly with acrylic and ink. Your eyes can´t get close enough to capture all the tiny coloured combs on the main layer and once you started, you´ll gonna get sucked into her world of bizarre. Her floating spooky girls and their animal friends, significants for youth and virginity, deal playfully with the morbid present of death and demise. Her girls´ playgrounds are the graveyards in our minds. The older we get,  the more we might get lost in the dark side of her images. The sweet innocent blurs faster and faster until it vanishes and is gone. Thanks to Ciou that she brings back all our unawakened reminiscences. Kittenish she combines them with our somber expectations of life. That´s how Ciou cheekily reminds everyone of us what real life is: a little bit of sweet and a little bit of sour.

Find more Ciou art and infos on http://www.ciou.eu/
[Click paintings to enlarge]

"Blood for rescue" mixed media

"Cure" mixed media

"Cute Cats and Lovers" mixed media

"Danse Macabre" mixed media

"Fire dance with me" mixed media

"Home sweet Home" mixed media

"Trinity" mixed media

"Vampire twins" mixed media

CIOU with Last Junkies On Earth
@
KochXBos Gallery Amsterdam
(CIOU, FEMKE HIEMSTRA & SARAH MAPLE SHOW)

Grande re-opening: KochxBos gallery opened with supershow in Amsterdam

the new KochxBos gallery

The Eerste Anjeliersdwarsstraat 36 in Amsterdam was packed with people when Hans Bos and Esther Koch reopened their lowbrow art gallery KochxBos in Amsterdam. After moving into a larger and bigger venue they called last saturday with a supershow: Ray Caesar, Sarah Maple, Bethany de Forest, Ciou, Nicoletta Ceccoli, Sauerkids, Meryl Donoghue, Leendert Masselink, Alicia Rius and Pepijn vd Nieuwendijk were the artists they curated and a lot of them arrived personally. The day turned into a European underground-art meet and greet festivity and the huge amount of visitors enjoyed talking to artists like Sarah Maple (London), the Sauerkids (Rotterdam), Femke Hiemstra (Amsterdam) or Ciou (Toulouse) in a calm and cosy athmosphere in the pop-surrealistic heart of Amsterdam. If your next trip is the Netherlands, make sure to stop by. Hans and Esther are looking forward to explain you the amazing art they sell. 

KochxBos Gallery

Eerste Anjeliersdwarsstraat 36
Amsterdam, the Netherlands

http://www.kochxbos.nl

scary neo-Art Nouveau meets Noise at KochxBos gallery:
artist Ciou from France and the german Noisepopper Bjoern Hering (Stuntcat)