Lucy McKenzie is young Scottish artist with a growing international following. Developing her own lexicon of passé utopias, McKenzie draws relations between the most unlikely sources: East European propaganda murals, German abstract painting, Cold War iconography, industrialist typeface and 1980’s pop music. From money, pop stars, to Olympians, McKenzie paints fleeting moments of idealism: symbols of transient seduction and power.

In Depeche Mode Night, she paints a concert poster over an ’anonymous’ abstract painting. It’s a haunting reflection of glory days, when culture was a political tool: when painting was Marxist dogma, and songs by a synth-pop band became the anthems for an entire generation caught between anarchy and Thatcherism.