SHANGHAI.- Presenting for the first time in Asia the famous artist SWOON – aka Caledonia Curry – the Danysz gallery is deploying the artist’s humanistic and philanthropic vision of our world. Considered these days as one of the major Street artist, SWOON has pasted her first artworks on the Brooklyn walls. From the beginning her cutout shapes and figures made of paper and mylar stick out for their extreme delicacy.

Raised in Florida, SWOON arrived in New York at the age of 19 to study art at the Pratt Institute. She took over the Brooklyn walls and her art soon unfolded around the world. She loves the ephemeral and immediate side of street art and the fragility of the work that makes it so vulnerable and poetic. SWOON has been exhibited at the MoMa in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the MoCa in Los Angeles, and recently at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, which has hosted a superb "mid-carreer retrospective" dedicated to the work of this prolific artist since 1999

SWOON gets her inspiration from many sources, cultures and people. From the Indonesian shadow theater to the caricatures of 19th century Honoré Daumier and contemporary Gordon Matta-Clark’s installations (who in his time also entered abandoned buildings to use recycled floors as a medium) all her references make her world very rich. Her artworks often start with encounters. The real and inspiring people she meets become her favorite subjects. Photographs of anonymous men, women or children she encounters while travelling are transposed into remarkably precise drawings. They symbolize moments of life and come in form of monumental portraits, scale 1 figures, all immersed in an out-of-the-ordinary world. Like a poem, each of SWOON’s work tells a relationship, a story or a lived experience.

SWOON supports many humanitarian causes throughout the world, delivering a message of peace with the permanent will to build a better society. She believes in the strength of the collective to improve the everyday life, for her "a collective allows to nourish the spirit of others". SWOON assisted the people of Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010, initiating a project called Konbit Shelter, a sustainable housing project. Since 2006, SWOON has also been exploring the seas with Swimming Cities, a boat made from recycled objects and furniture, which have traveled the world (from the Adriatic to the Venice Biennale, New York and India). She has also produced for her show at the Brooklyn Museum (2014) a worked called Submerged Motherland, addressing social and environmental issues with a gigantic figurative installation, depicting a troubling and enchanted forest.

The exhibition presented at the Danysz Gallery introduces a set of original artworks on paper and mylar including a site specific piece.