Sugar Ray

Sugar Ray, 2023

Bailey Lalonde🟡 Reserved

Price

€3,500

Medium

Acrylic on canvas

Technique

Painting

Dimensions

90 × 60 cm

Year

2023

Edition

1/1

About the Work

Sugar Ray is an abstract expressionist portrait of Sugar Ray Seales, whose trajectory from Olympic gold medalist to homelessness became the catalyst for the artist’s ongoing CHAMPIONS series and the initiative Taking Kare of Our Own, founded alongside Donny Lalonde to support retired fighters facing health and financial hardship after their careers. Rendered through fractured abstraction rather than likeness, the painting resists individual portraiture in order to speak to a broader condition shared by many elite athletes once public recognition fades. Against a charged green ground, orange crosses pulse throughout the composition, evoking both flashing lights and the disorientation of “seeing stars,” where glory, impact, and vulnerability collapse into the same visual field. Within The DANCE: Between Polarity, the work confronts the unstable distance between triumph and abandonment, visibility and erasure, asking what remains after spectacle has passed and the body is left to carry its history alone.

Artist

B

Bailey Lalonde

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LALONDE & LALONDE are an international artist duo whose collaborative practice builds on extensive independent careers. Bailey Lalonde (b. 1993) is a Canadian-born, Costa Rica-raised multidisciplinary artist and curator. Her work spans painting, performance, and film, and has been exhibited across New York, London, Paris, Milan, Amsterdam, Malta, Düsseldorf, Costa Rica, and Miami Art Basel. She has curated over 40 exhibitions featuring more than 250 artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Christi Lalonde maintains an independent studio practice alongside the collaboration, informed by her background as a professional dancer and interior designer. LALONDE & LALONDE is the collaborative painting practice of Bailey and Christi Lalonde. Working on shared canvases, the mother–daughter duo produces figurative paintings through a sustained process of layering, interruption, and reworking. Their approach, both additive and reductive, dissolves singular authorship while maintaining a unified visual language. Situated within contemporary abstract figuration, their work balances gesture and restraint, allowing figures to emerge through materially driven surfaces rather than narrative construction. Rooted in dialogue, the practice operates as an ongoing negotiation of mark-making, where control and intuition remain in constant exchange. The resulting paintings emphasize presence, embodiment, and emotional immediacy. Developed as a focused body of work over the past two years, LALONDE & LALONDE has been exhibited internationally and is held in private collections.

Exhibitions

  • EMBRACE MILANO2025, Eterno, Milano, IT
  • EMBRACE LONDON2025, Mortimer House by Maslow’s, London, UK
  • DOLCE VITA2025, Casa Vista Escondida by Christie’s, Potrero, CR
  • EMBRACE2024, Dacia Gallery, New York, NY
  • DEKONSTRUKT2023, LoftM71, Düsseldorf, DE