Opera Gallery hosts hyperrealist artist Mike Dargas’ first solo exhibition in Asia
Hong Kong’s art scene is already gearing up for March, most art-centric month of the year. Ahead of the two biggest art events in March – Art Basel and Art Central – the art galleries are hosting an array of art exhibitions by both local and overseas artists.
The most recent one to have caught our attention was Mike Dargas’ solo exhibition at Opera Gallery running from 19 January to 9 February. A German artist based in Los Angeles, he specialises in the perfect fusion of classic technique with the aesthetics of the digital age. Simply put, his paintings look so real that unless you look closely, they look like photographs.
Through this hyper-realistic technique, he explores the various nuances of human skin. A recurrent theme of his paintings is a frozen moment in time that arrests the path of a liquid dripping from a model’s face. This stillness – poignant in its spontaneity – captures the painting’s inner soul in a perfect moment. His current exhibition at the Opera Gallery, titled ‘Healing Beauty’, is all about this perfection of the soul and the feminine, fragile nature of identity. Dargas says, “My paintings catch an emotional snapshot and try to evoke a certain feeling to the viewer”.
