LONDON.- Marie Jose Gallery is presenting Wonderscape, a duo solo exhibition featuring two contemporary artists: Julien Calot, the French painter whos exhibiting for the first time in London with two series of work, along with the American sculptor Austyn Taylor whos a new exclusive talent to the gallery.
Wonderscape offers a poetic and immersive exploration of nature, memory, and emotion, creating a shared universe where landscapes and beings coexist: a world and its creatures, a landscape and its myth, a pulse and its voice.
In Calots paintings, we enter the landscape of the psyche, where memory, sensation, and nature merge in continuous motion. His densely composed canvases unfold as living, breathing ecosystems abundant with pattern and form that flow like emotional weather. The exhibition will feature a selection of exceptional landscapes along with playful animal inhabited wonderscapes.
Ive built these paintings as inner landscapes layers of memories and emotions composing intimate spaces. They reflect the joy of natural cycles: the passing of seasons, the rhythm of the animal world, the interlacing of living matter, light, and color. Julien Calot
Forests, waters, and dreamlike figures intermingle, mapping the cycles of life, transformation, and inner reflection. Each work becomes a meditation on memory, sensation, and the rhythm of being blending figuration and abstraction into a radiant, immersive continuum. Juliens landscapes of the mind paintings are reminiscent of the works of Billy Childish, Nicolas Party and Camilla Engstrom. San
Francisco-based artist, Austyn Taylor, will present for the first time eight new animal figures that are tender, humorous, and intimate embodiments of resilience, vulnerability, and the optimism of shared experience. Through tactility, gesture, and color, each sculpture mirrors the emotional resonance of Calots canvases, opening a vivid dialogue across mediums.
Each sculpture embodies the paradox of being alive, our absurdity, our beauty, and our longing for meaning. Their playfulness invites reflection in a world preoccupied with cynicism, I aim to make objects that disarm and console, that reawaken trust in our shared humanity. Austyn Taylor
Together, these artists construct a magical Wonderscape: one paints the emotional landscape, the other animates it with presence animal archetypes as surrogates for human feeling. Calots inner worlds pulse with motion and chromatic rhythm; Taylors sculptures bring those realms to life, introducing creatures that speak of tenderness and radical optimism. In a world increasingly defined by cynicism, Wonderscape celebrates connection, playfulness, and the enduring joy of observation.
With exhibitions spanning painting, sculpture, photography and design, Marie Jose Gallery is dedicated to socially conscious curation staging striking cultural and existential narratives that aim to expand the boundaries of contemporary art discourse. By creating a space where urgent social issues and personal histories intersect, the gallery empowers artists to challenge convention and engage audiences in meaningful conversations.
Julien Calot (b. 1981) is a French painter based in Paris. His large-scale works depict teeming worlds vibrant, organic, and emotional where animals, landscapes, and abstract forms coexist in constant motion. Combining figuration and abstraction, his instantly recognizable style draws inspiration from tribal art, European modernism, surf culture, and the pulse of contemporary cities. A swirling language of signs, lines, and forms tells stories without beginnings or ends a kaleidoscope of emotion. A self-taught painter, Julien also explores writing, music, photography, and filmmaking. His creative approach is instinctive and free, with no boundaries between disciplines guided by the need to express what moves him.
In parallel, Julien is an acclaimed creative leader in the world of communication. He is Chief Creative Officer of McCann Paris, and Global Creative Director for LOréal brands. His unusual path between art and advertising has shaped a unique sensibility, both conceptual and sensual, emotionally driven and socially engaged. His work has been exhibited in France (Paris, Lyon, La Rochelle) and internationally in New York, Hong Kong, and across major art fairs in Europe and the US.
Born in New York, Austyn Taylor began sculpting after unexpectedly discovering a stockpile of clay while teaching art at a charter school in Denver, Colorado. This chance encounter led her back to New York for an MFA in Ceramics at Alfred University, followed by an eight-year journey as a resident artist across the USA, China, Denmark, and Lebanon.
With travel, personal loss and repetition Taylors practice deepened, and in the 2020s her work began gaining recognition. Her sculptures have been exhibited internationally, from Hong Kong, New York City, Los Angeles, Beirut, Paris, London, Tokyo among others. Taylors work merges humor, sincerity, and sculptural invention to create animal characters that embody both the absurdity and the tenderness of contemporary life.