D*Face

22Oct09

dface_morepunk

Almost as prolific as street artist Banksy, D*Face is a London-based stencil artist worth mentioning. He was initially introduced to the graffiti art scene through NY Spraycan and Subway Art, and later through skateboarding, punk music, and Thrasher Magazine, until he finally picked up his markers and began to use his hometown as his canvas.

“I wanted to encourage people to not just ‘see’, but to look at what surrounds them and their lives, reflecting our increasingly bizarre popular culture, re-thinking and reworking cultural figures,” D*Face has said, reworking figures such as Marilyn Monroe and the Queen of England (see images below). He describes his work as “a welcome jolt of subversion in today’s media-saturated environment,” and a sort of “Pandora’s box of bittersweet delights – sweet and sugary on the surface, but with an unfamiliar, uncomfortable, taste beneath.”

D*Face’s works are politically charged in an entertaining, comical, shock-factor sense. They are terrifyingly explicit messages forced into cartoon figures, producing a kind of nightmarish carnival effect, perhaps likened to a haunted Disney. They are a hybrid of Pop Art and DIY Street Art that tries to ‘stick it to the man.’

Since his first solo exhibition (“Death & Glory”) at the Stolenspace gallery in London of October 2006, D*Face has exhibited around the world and now owns Stolen Space Gallery. And as he says, “This isn’t the beginning, it’s not the end… it’s happy never ending.”

dface_marilyn D*Face. 2009. Multiple Pop Tarts. “All Your Dreams Belong to Us,” J.Levine Gallery. NYC.