Kourtney Roy approaches this complexity by doing what is most intrinsic to her practice: she transforms reality into an unstable and ambiguous set, playing with the city’s contradictions to generate constructed, disorienting, and quietly surreal situations.
Faithful to her visual language—hyperreal colors, theatrical lighting, and dark humour, always suspended between irony and disquiet—Roy stages and embodies fictional personas as a tool of exploration. Her body fragments into a constellation of excessive, grotesque, irreverent, and provocative female characters, inspired by a Neapolitan aesthetic filtered through cinema, popular culture, literature, and the artist’s daily observation of the city.
Failed Postcards from Napoli does not propose a single narrative: meaning remains fluid and open to interpretation. Within this ambiguity, Roy reflects on identity and desire, toying with and subverting familiar stereotypes.
Kourtney Roy, Frutta secca, 2025 - Courtesy of the artist and the gallery
Gallery
- Kourtney Roy, Views of the City, 2025 - Courtesy of the artist and the gallery