The color of money, 2025

Michael Pybus  

Michael Pybus (born 1982 in Darlington, UK) subverts the codes of contemporary visual culture with biting acuity. Trained at Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art in London, he develops a polymorphous practice in which painting, sculpture, and installation seize upon symbols of globalized consumerism, pop franchises, and identity narratives.

Crossing Pikachu and IKEA, Barbie and Lucio Fontana's scars, activist slogans and digital stuffed animals, Pybus constructs a saturated, joyfully toxic visual language, where references to art history are invited without hierarchy: Richard Prince, Christopher Wool, Josh Smith, David Hockney and even Warhol blend into a landscape of remixed mainstream culture.

Through this aesthetic of assumed pastiche, he questions the role of the image in a filtered world, where authenticity becomes simulacrum and where even contemporary art becomes merchandise. He manipulates, deconstructs, fetishizes, to better reveal the tensions between individuality and spectacle, between commitment and strategy, between citation and appropriation.

His work has been exhibited internationally, including in London, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin, Athens, Shanghai, and Tokyo. It is featured in numerous public and private collections, including:
Arts Council Collection (UK), Takashi Murakami Collection (Japan), Zabludowicz Collection (UK), Philippos Tsangrides Collection (Greece), Popov Collection (Russia)… as well as in private collections in the United States, Brazil, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Canada, Australia, China, and many others.