If you're looking for Lowbrow. When Worlds Collide: Explorations into the New Contemporary is the ticket to over 70 of today's emerging and most extraordinary artists of the art movement. Guest curated by Lowbrow and Pop-Surrealist pioneer Dennis Larkins along with gallery director and street artist Jared Antonio-Justo Trujillo, the exhibit revels in one of the fastest growing art movements as it traverses the past, present, and future of New Contemporary.

Gregory Hergert Hamlet

Van Arno, Anthony Ausgang, Mark BryanHR GigerKRK Ryden, RK Sloane, Joe Vaux, and Eric Joyner are among the major players of the New Contemporary movement displaying their work alongside up-and-coming artists of the area, who showcase the broad vista of the northern New Mexico art scene in a geographic and historical context.

Growing out of car culture, graffiti, comics, tattooing, and alternative art forms, the New Contemporary genre encompasses lowbrow, post-pop, and pop-surrealist work. At the heart of the movement's ascendancy in Los Angeles in the 1990s, alongside Juxtapoz founders Greg Escalante and Robert Williams, Larkins contributed to a genre that's still humming. When Worlds Collide showcases a west coast movement that has gone global while highlighting its connections to northern New Mexico culture.

Dennis Larkins Alien Nation

This exhibition, and KEEP Contemporary's overall vision, importantly continues a local dialogue around New Contemporary art that was sparked by the 2014/15 Harwood Museum exhibition ¡Orale! Kings and Queens of Cool, a show, also co-curated by Larkins, that demonstrated “the transformation and integration of what once was considered “low” art into “high” art.” With a focus on the west coast roots of the movement, contemporary expressions of Hispano, Lowrider and street culture of northern New Mexico earned a place on the stage. Curator of Exhibitions at the Harwood, Jina Brenneman described the Post-Pop and Lowbrow style as “...anything from the streets and of the people. Heart versus intellect, art that embodies technical craftsmanship blended with fantastical imagery and visually dynamic narratives.”

KEEP Contemporary's latest exhibition "When Worlds Collide: Explorations into the New Contemporary" opens this weekend, June 14th, with an opening reception from 5 to 8 pm. On display through July 14, 2019.