ANIMALIA
evan lovejoy

august 2025

ANIMALIA is a new exhibition by Brockley-local Evan Lovejoy exploring our shifting interpretations of the animal form – how we understand, represent and often misrepresent the creatures we share our world with.

The works span from earlier pieces that contrast the tactile textures of skin and fur with the stark flatness of cartoon mascots, to newer paintings where those boundaries blur, the plasticity of animal bodies meeting the plasticity of paint itself. Each piece functions as a kind of “study,” not in the scientific sense, but as an exploration of how fragmented our understanding of animals can be when stripped of context.

The creatures are not drawn from direct observation but assembled from layers of reference: images from the internet, glimpses from documentaries, pages of old books, and memories filtered through Lovejoy’s imagination. They are misinformed studies, gestures toward understanding, the true animal becoming more and more separated from our consciousness and replaced by artifice.

As a child, Evan’s sketchbooks were filled with mythical beasts born from his imagination alongside the real animals he encountered in his everyday life: As a child, Evan’s family moved from London to a coastal town in South Florida; foxes and stag beetles replaced by dolphins, manatees, and alligators. He worked as a junior zookeeper and later as a veterinary technician, deepening his understanding of the human-animal relationship. Through painting Evan hopes to encapsulate his own dichotomous relationship with animals — a mixture of wonder for the natural world and disgust with our own complicity in anthropogenic environmental destruction.