In an accelerated global visual economy, Western culture is exported to the East, and then folded back into a synthesized field of fashion, film, ads, music videos, anime and New Age practices. In this way, Munro Galloway imagines an urban space which, like the floating world, is at once exotic and familiar.

Galloway’s paintings are fluent in the visual language of the ambient cultural zone they describe. They portray a fathomable, fictional Orient, a place neither here nor there, but amalgamated out of representations that have already undergone a process of quick transformation, the sampling and morphing that deletes pre-existing connotations and superimposes others.

The sculptures materialize the mix. They include such hybrids as a benign buddha discoball and incense burners cast in a cocktail of recreational and prescription drugs: the stimulants and sedatives, antidepressants and antihistamines, vitamins and analgesics which make up the pharmaceutical profile of this generation.

Munro Galloway lives and works in New York. This is his first solo show at Murray Guy.