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"My paintings are all about moments. It's almost like a performance piece that ended up on a painting."

Michael Kagan is an artist and space enthusiast fascinated by the limits of human potential. His mesmerising paintings depict surfers, race car drivers, and, most prominently, astronauts with oil on linen, screen-printing, and over-painted photographic prints. In both form and content, the compositions oscillate between extremes: up-close jagged abstract mark-making is revealed, while further away the brushstrokes tighten into representational scenes at the cusp of potential and fatal disaster. With a bold palette of blues, blacks, whites and dashes of red, Kagan’s signature brushstroke is sharp and angular, resembling an elongated pixel. These committed, gestural marks echo the strength and dedication that his subjects devote to their vocations.

Notions of ‘the hero’ form a modern iconography in Kagan’s work. At almost eight metres wide and two metres high, Apollo 15 (2015) is the artist’s largest painting to date. The work has a mural-esque grandeur that meets the historic weight of its subject: humankind on the moon. The work depicts the fourth successful lunar mission with astronaut Jim Irwin saluting the American flag. Exhibited at the Hughes Aircraft Factory in California, one of the first places to manufacture spacecrafts, the painting crystallises a grand history of technology, national pride and human endeavour. A symbol of realised dreams, Irwin transcends from human to icon: an angel of science and symbol of limitless possibility. Fluctuating between a grand vision and a flash moment, Kagan’s paintings freeze archetypal moments of extremity, stretching them out into bold and captivating works.