From April 11 to May 18 2014, Cortex Athletico Gallery-Paris presents, for the first time, a solo exhibition of the American artist Edy Ferguson. Entitled Coke Tragedy, this show presents a body of paintings and drawings realized between 2008 and 2014.

Coke Tragedy puts in space a visual diary where popular icons of the pop-punk culture (such as Amy Winehouse or Ian Curtis from the band Joy Division) rub shoulders with literary character (Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov from the novel Crime et Châtiment of Dostoyevsky), and televisual (Lady Diana). All become characters in tragic dramas that become the content (or excuse) for a practice that is tied to a vocabulary steeped in sculpture. Ferguson is greatly influenced by late masters of modernism in both painting and sculpture; the dialogue she holds with her own art is not far from such figures as Alexander Calder, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, Matisse or Picasso. Inside these spaces, she inserts dramas that pass through her world, as characters in a play that she adopts in order to create a new visual language that communicates a new kind of space.
Ferguson believes there is nothing about great art that changes, it is only forever updated to keep afresh with our evolving technological, cultural and social mechanisms, and this is the reason she opens her practice to a variety of media, such as music installation, video and film installation, performance, photography or drawing. All her artworks are pursued from the perspective of a painter who strives to make every work (even a painting) exist in real space and time with weight, volume and mass, as any successful sculpture would.

Edy Ferguson was born in Chicago and lives and works in New York. Travel is an important part of her art-making practice; she has lived and worked in Vienna, Greece, London and France.