Juls Gabs is a digital painter and media artist who dissolves the classical definition of painting and re-applies its significance to address contemporary demands. She explores new figuration through the digital and invents alternative canvases combining traditional and technology-inspired methods.

 

Her work often takes art history and historical ideas as a starting point for digital works that heavily criticise current global sociopolitical practices. Hinting at classic figuration, Gabs' early influences include French Romanticism and British Pre-Raphaelite painting like Waterhouse and Delacroix: she transformed this into Loose Figuration on contemporary mediums (digital paintings, electronic sculptures, Google Maps paintings). The computer is the incubator of ideas and experimentation that produces physical installations with a mix of traditional materials printed or manipulated by digital techniques. But she includes within them a current awareness of times of crisis and ecological disease; and how this has been absorbed and neutralised by working lifestyle and media propaganda.
 

Gabs keeps exploring new surfaces, shapes and locations to paint the traditional concepts of Nature and Society. As these topics are running towards their decline, it feels essential to reinvent how we talk about and portray them in art. She heavily criticises how economic societies condition our natural assets today in a ‘destructive growth’. In contrast, she believes sustainable technology could help us reconnect with nature through genuine human collaboration.

 

Gabs was born in Spain and studied Fine Arts and Media in Madrid. She started her art career in London where the themes of Accessibility and Inclusion became crucial. For her Digital is political, and the best way to promote these two concepts: it provokes accessibility to information and equality. This is why she often works with open-source software: It is the best way to democratise art and society. 

 

Now she paints her hopes for the future, connecting cultures and offering an arena of non-traditional experimentation that incorporates new perspectives and challenges the ordinary.  Her creations give you a sight of a near future, with the feeling of magical predictions or beliefs. A better tale that we can build together.