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Johnny Romeo

Young Grind

Name: Young Grind - Harvey Galleries
SKU: H33510
Price: 8895.00 AUD
Availability: OutOfStock

SKU: H33510

Acrylic and Oil on Canvas

124 x 124 cm Framed

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H33510 Young Grind

When you live life to the fullest, not even death can stop you. Johnny Romeo takes this idea and pushes it to gloriously Absurdist heights with his signature Pop flair and twisted sense of humour in Young Grind. The painting portrays a vibrant, Technicolor skull donning a skater cap and living their best life as they smoke a cigar. Vivacious, confectionary sweet hues burst from the canvas with an irrepressible energy, highlighting the hedonistic skate-punk skeleton’s liveliness and active defiance of death. This interplay between death and life is further explored in the clever word assemblage ‘Decayable’. Romeo deftly transforms the word into ‘Unfadable’ to capture the skull’s refusal to rot and desire to fully embrace life. Renowned for his cheeky, unexpected pop references, the artist depicts the skull with a cap emblazoned with the classic Pepsi Cola logo as a nod to the soda company’s famous 1984 advertising campaign ‘The Choice of a Generation’. Within the context of the painting, the term ‘generation’ is playfully subverted to spoof popular sayings like ’50 is the new 30’ and declare that the ‘new generation of death is life’. Skate culture features prominently in the work, as seen through the skull’s skater look and the title Young Grind. Often considered the domain of the young, Romeo humorously re-envisions his very dead skull with the youthful exuberance of skaters going against the ‘daily grind’ of everyday life. Skateboarding is further alluded to through the popular skate trick term ‘grind’, which imbues the painting with a thrilling sense of motion.

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About Johnny Romeo

Johnny Romeo is an internationally acclaimed Australian painter, widely regarded as Australia’s leading Pop artist. As a seminal figure in the global Neo-Expressionist Pop movement, Romeo fuses the irreverent swagger of rock’n’roll with the visual semiotics of comic books and the raw immediacy of street art. GQ Magazine Australia aptly described his aesthetic as ‘part punk, part pop’, a stylistic hybrid that defines Romeo’s vivid, neon-drenched works and its balance of candy colour explosions and punchy, rebellious imagery. Romeo’s signature Kitsch Pop paintings are electrifying visual assemblages, combining Technicolour palettes and urban iconography to produce a visceral, high-octane art experience.