Feast, 2026

Augustina Droze  

In “Feast", a surreal banquet unfolds in a lush, shadowed garden. This painting captures a moment of high tension and theatrical chaos. A blue tiger looms over the table. Its expression is fierce. A small monkey reaches out with a playful yet provocative gesture. Between them, a spilled glass of red wine streaks across the surface like a wound. The composition vibrates with a sense of Rococo abundance. Ornate carvings and golden accents contrast with the raw energy of the animal kingdom. A bright orange snake coils near a candelabra. A pink flamingo anchors the foreground with its vivid plumage. The artist blends Eastern and Western influences to create a modern mythology. Every element serves as a symbolic narrator. The atmosphere is simultaneously beautiful and bewildering. It explores the contradictions of nature and artifice. The deep greens of the foliage envelop the scene. This creates an immersive, dreamlike landscape. Light flickers from the candles. It illuminates the scattered fruit and floral debris. The gaze is drawn to the clash of colours and the frozen movement of the creatures. The scene concludes with a meticulous focus on the textures of fur, scales, and velvet.

The contemporary artist Augustina Droze uses animals as symbols to describe her personal lived experiences. Her current body of work explores her life as a foreigner, her gaze upon the world as exotic, beautiful and bewildering. As an expat living in Beijing for the past ten years and currently in Barcelona, Droze's work incorporates elements of East and West. Her swirling, dream-like paintings are colourful and confrontational, brimming with Rococo inspired abundance. She creates her own modern mythology, a storybook land where she is the other in a very other worldly landscape. Droze has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally in numerous shows, notably the Castellani Art Museum, Niagara Falls, New York (2014), Banaras Hindu University as Fulbright Senior Scholar, Varanasi, India (2017), the Beijing US Embassy as Distinguished Art Envoy (2022), London Biennale (2023), Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (2024) and Carrousel du Louvre (2025).