London Art Fair - Golden Chips & The 3 Bears
Golden Chips and The Three Bears - 2025 - Oil & Acrylic on Canvas - 244cm x 183cm
LUAP unveils Golden Chips & The Three Bears, a monumental new painting that captures and elevates the luminous charge of an ordinary life. In this work, LUAP stages a powerful confrontation between the familiar and the surreal. Three of his iconic Pink Bears crowd a booth in a seaside restaurant, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, intensely engaged in the ritual of eating fish and chips under a sheet of stark, pale, nostalgic light. The painting is a visual meditation on working-class ritual, shared memory, and the lasting comfort found in simple pleasures.
The restaurant is Steels in Cleethorpes, a traditional fish and chip institution that has been a fixture of the seaside resort since the 1940s. For LUAP, it is a deeply personal space: a family landmark tied to birthdays, Christmas celebrations, and one final meal with his Grandad. Crucially, the setting stands in for many such working-class gathering places where warmth and togetherness are built around hot plates and worn tabletops. Staying true to the place, the portions of fish are genuinely huge, speaking to generosity and value. LUAP harnesses this biographical weight, pushing the scene to the edge of the surreal, transforming the familiar feast into an image of abundance, care, and a well-earned treat.
The painting is materially charged, revealing the complex, layered process behind the image. The surface is built up through vigorous application: the initial abstract washes and ghosted wallpaper patterns from his childhood home, visible in the background's muted greens and golds, create a texture that suggests both decaying wallpaper and the heavy atmosphere of a remembered room. The plush texture of the bears' suits is built up with applications of hot pink and magenta paint, giving them an almost sculptural presence. This contrasts sharply with the background, where the light is diffused, running across the formica table and highlighting the everyday objects, from slices of bread and a ketchup bottle that seems to glow with its own small halo, that anchor a sense of belonging and continuity.
In this work, The Pink Bear (an emotional cipher originally developed through cognitive behavioural therapy) is no longer a lone figure. The grouping of the three suggests a collective - a support system, a conversation, and the feeling of being held within a familiar, warm space. Golden Chips & The Three Bears asks viewers to look closer at the rituals of their own lives. It celebrates the joyful friction of being together, and how the memory of a hot meal in a cherished, ordinary room can stay with us long after the plate is cleared, transforming the humble, local restaurant into a temple of shared human experience.
“Fish & Chips was always the Friday treat, but Steels was for special occasions. We would pile in as a family, order the jumbo fish and chips and it felt like the world stopped for a bit. I wanted to hold that warmth and togetherness, and the way those moments stay alive inside you. The Pink Bear creates a space for that feeling, that is open enough for other people to step into.”