For CAN Art Ibiza, Tube Gallery brings together a group of artists whose practices span painting, sculpture, installation, moving image, and text—but who are united by a shared commitment to probing the complexities of contemporary life through material, aesthetic, and conceptual experimentation. These are not artists bound by a single movement or school, but rather by an urgency to respond to the world as it is now: saturated, unstable, performative, and mediated.
From poetic abstraction and digital-age commentary to sensory immersion and speculative objects, this selection highlights the wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and often unconventional voices we work with. These artists explore the porous boundaries between the real and the constructed, the digital and the tactile, the personal and the systemic. Each practice offers a distinct lens—intimate, critical, surreal, or humorous—through which we might reimagine how we see, feel, and understand our place within a hyper-mediated, fast-moving culture.
The result is a dynamic constellation of practices that resist easy categorization, but together form a rich and resonant portrait of contemporary art-making.
Lydia Blakeley (b. 1980, Bracknell, UK) uses painting to interrogate aspiration and self-image in the age of social media. Starting from digital snapshots and online culture, she transforms ephemeral, aspirational imagery—pets, interiors, food trends—into refined, deadpan paintings. Her work freezes the visual noise of contemporary life, inviting reflection on the curated self and digital performance. With a background in fine art and a strong exhibition history, including Hayward Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, and Niru Ratnam Gallery, Blakeley’s practice combines cultural commentary with an instantly recognisable aesthetic.
Max Boyla (b. 1991, Edinburgh, Scotland) is a London-based Scottish painter whose work inhabits a liminal space between the real and the fictional. Using synthetic satin as his surface, Boyla creates atmospheric, abstract worlds that reflect on disillusionment and the search for transcendence. His paintings are unmoored from time and place, offering meditative cosmologies that question the nature of illusion, perception, and reality. A recent graduate of the Royal Academy Schools, Boyla has already participated in major exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth, Sim Smith, Workplace, and the ICA.
Jack Burton (b. 1988, Barry, Wales) is a painter whose works blur the lines between media, fusing photography, collage, and expressionist painting into densely layered compositions. With influences ranging from street art to pop culture, Burton’s pieces feel like fragmented dreams—chaotic, colourful, and deeply resonant. His works evoke the speed and saturation of modern life, functioning as both critique and celebration of its visual excess. Burton has exhibited widely, with recent solo and group exhibitions in Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, and Taipei.
Richard Dean Hughes (b. 1987, Manchester, UK) lives and works in Manchester, UK. He describes the slippery relationship between the real and hypothetical. Hughes often revisits and describes a personal and internal space, taking artifacts, feelings and ‘visuals’ from imagined scenarios, bringing them into real time through the manipulation of material and collisional objects. His sculptures question the idea of plausibility, they question their own existence, acting as a representational display of the space in which Hughes is trying to describe. Select recent exhibitions include: Spherical Sadness,Piccalilli Gallery, London (2024); And the Safe Spots Become Impassable, Hong Kong (2024); Twelve Thousand, Duo Show with Nicola Ellis, Manchester (2024); A Mirror to Vanity, Brooke Bennington, London (2024) and NADA Art Fair New York, Xxijra Hii Gallery (solo presentation, 2024).
Hamish Morrow (b. 1968, South Africa) lives and works in London and Paris. Drawing on his extensive experience in fashion as a designer/creative director, he utilises aesthetics, surfaces, glamour, beauty, visual allure and seductive materials in his art making in order to create experiences/encounters that attempt to produce an emotional response in the viewer. His use of aesthetics across a diverse range of media including film, painting, sculpture, sound, performance and exhibition environments is a conscious strategy to show rather than tell, to communicate by creating visual experiences that are immediate, perceptual, pleasurable and emotional.
Ahren Warner (b. 1986, Oxford, UK) is a multidisciplinary artist and writer working across photography, moving-image, installation, and poetry. Warner’s practice explores the intersections of affect, logic, and globalised systems of desire and consumption. Through a poetic and experimental lens, his works grapple with contemporary illiberalism, capitalism, and the disorienting conditions of modern life. Recent exhibitions include solo and group shows at TJ Boulting, Saatchi Gallery, South London Gallery, and Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City. He has also received numerous literary awards and published three critically acclaimed books.
