EVAN HYNES: REBEL’S KINGDOM
March 15 – May 3, 2025 | Opening: Saturday, May 3 | 6-8 pm
Evan Hynes, Feel The Joy, Bad Boy, 2023, colored pencil & marker on paper, 18 x 12″
Tierra del Sol gallery presents Evan Hynes’ Rebel’s Kingdom. Hynes has been with the Studio Arts program for twelve years and this is his second solo exhibition with the gallery.
Hynes’ superpower is twofold: his playful depiction of real people as superheroes, and his deep saturation of color. Like Takashi Murakami, Hynes is inspired by fictional worlds filled with colorful characters that they personalize and bring into the art canon in meaningful ways. Murakami references traditional Japanese aesthetics and Hynes employs portraiture with the relations as sitter/model/muse.
Rebel’s Kingdom centers the Master Piece series comprised of drawings of Hynes’ girlfriend Amanda. In these works, Amanda takes on the persona of the heroine in her relationship with Hynes as she moves through various landscapes, often with Hynes by her side. Her visage and attire change throughout, and the viewer sees her through his eyes, demonstrating Hynes’ ability to disrupt traditional canonical practice for a layered, playful and personal approach to immortalizing intimacy.
The exhibition highlights Hynes’ complex compositions that layer color, material, geometry and text. His drawings build from sharpie outlines to deeply saturated color fields embedded with silhouettes, as well as forms and abstracted architecture that expertly situate the background in support of a principal subject that is an historical figure, family or friend of Hynes. His use of color is bold and sophisticated, as much a part of the narrative as the text that often covers the front and back of the paper.
Hynes’ ephemeral works have a timeless quality, teasingly dancing with then adamantly rejecting normalized concepts of art history that do not reflect his appreciation of materials and subjects. His love of history, particularly Egyptian Pharaoh dynasties, is another important series in the solo exhibition. In these dynamic works, Hynes depicts stoic pharaohs and their familiars: birds, cats and leopards, in abstracted temples and with earthly elements that they represent.
With works that seem to be barely contained on the paper, this joyful practice makes the exhibition a much- needed experience. Here rebellion is less about violence and more about collective emotion as a gathering of portraits and people intent on celebrating all the ways our superhuman abilities make knowing and community possible.
Evan Hynes’ Rebel’s Kingdom opens at Tierra del Sol Gallery in West Hollywood on Saturday, March 15th with a reception from 6-8 pm. The exhibition will be on view through May 3rd, 2025.
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