Join us for the opening reception of Participation Trophies featuring Mike Gallegos, Leon Loucheur, and Harrison Nealey. Curated by neü folk. On display September 2 – October 1.
Art is devoid of competition, truly. The achievement is in the making. Showing up is the win. Each of the artists featured in this gathering have been cultivating their skills since early in their youth. Their work tells the story of lessons learned along the way.
Leon Loucheur is a San Francisco-based artist who specializes in acrylic, fine art painting.
Leon is a graduate from Humboldt State University with a degree in Social Science. He began painting after graduation, moving to San Francisco to pursue his passion for the visual arts, and tending bar at night to supplement the journey. Combined with a love of the outdoors and an enduring graffiti habit, these formative experiences influenced the subject and tone of Leon’s work. Aesthetically-pleasing designs invoke the clarity of nature and interplay with notes of unruliness and degradation to create counterpoint and touch on themes of desire and destruction. Leon’s work offers unexpected surprises that raise questions about our relationship to ecology, and our tendency to choose short term comforts over long term well-being.
Leon works from his home studio in the Richmond District of San Francisco.
Harrison is known throughout Denver for his custom furniture and metal fabrication work. A lasting member of the RTD graffiti crew and one half of the legendary Magnet Mafia street art collective. His artwork is reminiscent of his previous abstract paintings on canvas combined with his metalwork expertise and a hint of his identity as a vandal.
Mike Gallegos is a Colorado-based artist whose work embodies a casual spontaneity alive with color and motion. His approach to painting is completely unpremeditated and reflects an evolving dialogue between the artist and piece of art – a visual call and response brought to life in paint. Employing animals, ghosts, fonts, people, and anthropomorphic trees, Gallegos’ characters are usually fragmenting into the abstract fray that encompasses them. Mike’s art reflects the life he lives, and his images are frequently autobiographical, reflecting his sense of alienation, his dark humor, and his playful mischief. Mike never went to art school. He learned from his environment, and from the spontaneous burst of inspiration that erupted from his hand, like a channeler, intuiting and building an instinctual understanding of the expression as it pours forth from unknown origins.
Mike currently lives in Denver where he is up every day before the sun to run his daily route as a garbage collector.
neü folk aims to spotlight emerging artists; to introduce collectors to contemporary voices who share an affinity for analog or traditional media.
— Max Kauffman, artist & curator