February, 2022, Watercolour, 56cm x 76cm, Watercolour
The Pink Bear sits at the centre of LUAP’s practice, appearing across Painting, Photography, Sculpture, Performance and Installation. Acting as both alter ego and emotional cipher, the figure creates a space to explore memory, identity, vulnerability and the tension between outward appearance and internal experience.
Placed within remote landscapes, architectural spaces and unexpected environments, The Pink Bear shifts between familiarity and dislocation. Its playful form is deliberately at odds with the psychological weight carried by the work, allowing complex emotional states to surface through an image that initially appears accessible. Across LUAP’s evolving body of work, the character remains a constant presence through which personal experience can become something more universal.
LUAP, Wapp Art and Niya Ruseva present Trees Are For Life, Not Just For Christmas, transforming a concrete space in Wapping into a temporary forest of discarded Christmas trees. As the trees dry and change, the Installation extends their presence beyond the brief celebration for which they were cut.
LUAP paints C'est Ne Pas Banana, a 3 × 3 metre Public Art Intervention in Notting Hill. The Pink Bear appears eating a banana, playing with an everyday object that has acquired an unusually persistent place within art and popular culture.
LUAP presents Time Can Escape You in Gallery No.32’s Between Frames at The Factory Project during Frieze Week 2021. Across a sequence of reclaimed doors, The Pink Bear moves through successive moments as a bouquet is gradually scattered by the wind.
After receiving emergency NHS treatment at the beginning of 2020, LUAP begins giving artworks directly to frontline workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Love Our NHS grows from a personal experience of care and a desire to return some of that support through art.
