LOYAL is pleased to present Garden, Zoé Blue M’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Zoé Blue M’s practice explores memory, cultural hybridity, historical narrative, and the complexities of identity through vivid, immersive visual worlds. Drawing from her French, Japanese and West Coast American heritage, her paintings bring together references ranging from ukiyo-e prints and Noh theater to anime, manga, and contemporary popular culture, while examining the psychological and emotional dimensions of femininity, adolescence, and family history.

Her figures swing between exuberance and emotional turbulence. Depicted with animated eyes and surrounded by richly rendered patterns, hyperbolic color, and areas of deep black, they inhabit spaces that feel familiar yet difficult to pin down. Mirrors, reflections, and repeated figures recur throughout her work, where states of self and gaze commingle across solitude, community, past and present.

In Garden, relationships remain central. Figures move through worlds that seem to be continually shifting around them. They run, swing, take aim, look back, and hold onto one another. Birds cross overhead, water ripples beneath their feet, foliage creeps into the edges of the frame, while mirrors and openings offer partial views into spaces beyond. Movement becomes a way of navigating both the external world and the more unstable terrain of the psyche.

Two figures share the precarious movement of a swing, their bodies folding into one another, while elsewhere they move forward hand in hand beneath a gathering of black birds. When the figures appear alone, they take aim or multiply through mirrors. Intimacy and play persist throughout, alongside a sense of uncertainty and unsettlement.

The garden of the exhibition is not simply a place of refuge. The intensity of color and pattern gives these scenes exuberance and flight, while darker forms repeatedly interrupt them. Zoé Blue M’s figures negotiate these competing forces without ever becoming entirely overwhelmed by them. They remain active inside the image, looking, choosing, holding on, moving forward.

Zoé Blue M (b. 1994, Toulon, France) is a Japanese-American artist raised in Los Angeles, where she lives and works. She received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2023 and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019. She has presented solo exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch (New York), LOYAL (Stockholm), Page NYC (New York), Anat Ebgi (Los Angeles), Gallery @ El Centro (Los Angeles), and In Lieu (Los Angeles), among others.