On Saturday, February 21st, downtown Los Angeles’ Corey Helford Gallery (CHG) will proudly unveil a new solo show from Irish oil painter Chloe Early, titled Futures, in Gallery 2.

Working in oils on aluminium panel, Early’s color-saturated works combine the splendour of Renaissance and Romantic painting with the rawness of contemporary life, an example of 'the iron fist in a velvet glove' strategy. Her imagery often juxtaposes dream-like female figures, symbolic motifs, and imagined landscapes to explore themes of duality, journey, and place. Her approach freely mines tropes from the history of art and mythology to retell an old story in a new way. Through color and mark making, she aims to imbue her work with a heightened sense of memory and emotion—freezing a moment of extreme poignancy in time. Futures marks Early’s fifth solo show at CHG, following her mini-solo Day-Glo Wanderstar (July 2023).

Regarding her new works, Early shares, “In these new paintings, I imagine what happens when the Irish myth of Tír na nÓg (Land of the young) leaves its ancient shoreline and washes up against the edges of 1980’s Americana. What begins as a land of eternal youth becomes a neon-saturated daydream—an unlikely collision of old-world myth and mall magic, where rollerskaters drift and time stretches into an endless loop, a place with abundant futures.

Tír na nÓg’s promise is a place untouched by age or sorrow, an island paradise where time is experienced differently. That promise is reinterpreted here through a visual language built from synthetic color, chrome reflections, and the hyper-real optimism of 1980s pop culture. The result is a liminal landscape where folklore is rendered in bubblegum pinks, electric blues, and saturated ultraviolet—where mythic timelessness meets the cultural fantasy of eternal youth told through arcade lights, roller rinks, and suburban sunsets.

Futures is an exploration of how myth is continually rewritten, remixed, and re-felt. In a world where the sacred can coexist with the plastic, these works examine what paradise looks like when it’s filtered through memory, pop culture, and the lens of retro-futurism. Here, Tír na nÓg is not a distant island, but a rollerskating rink at the edge of time, a feeling of limitless possibilities, resplendent with the energy and unadulterated joy of girlhood.”