Sickboy
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Sickboy: "A Small Matter of Life and Death"
Solo exhibition
17 September - 1 October 2016
Originally from the North of England, Sickboy grew up in the Manchester area. On coming of age, he decided to move to Bristol to study visual communication, graphic design and fine art.
On arriving in Bristol, Sickboy discovered a lively and quirky art scene. It was the end of the 90s and England was witnessing the birth of what was to become known as the "Street Art" movement. Immersed in this underground milieu, Sickboy rubs shoulders with artists such as Banksy, Inkie and Nick Walker. They gradually became friends and are now all important figures in British urban art. Alongside his studies, Sickboy spends a large part of his days and nights painting the walls of the city. For him, this practice of graffiti is synonymous with freedom. It allows him to evacuate his stress as well as to travel and discover new horizons. Sickboy later moved to London, but kept a studio in Bristol, where he painted in the streets and developed his work on canvas. His paintings and installations reached an ever-widening audience, not least because of the inventiveness he displayed. The mid to late 2000s saw street art explode in England. Numerous galleries devoted themselves to this movement and the Tate Modern in London devoted an exhibition to it in 2008. In reaction to this exhibition, initially conceived by Sickboy as an institutional recovery of an underground movement, the artist decided to create an installation on the Millennium Bridge, opposite the Museum. He locked a heart in a cage...
A few years earlier, Sickboy had moved to Barcelona - without leaving England for good.
There, he was taken by the architecture of Gaudi, just as he had already fallen in love with the paintings and buildings of Hundertwasser. From these inspirations his famous logo was born: The Temple. This logo allows him to detach himself from letters, pseudonyms and the egotrip that is linked to them. Between Bristol, Barcelona and London, Sickboy travels regularly. His paintings, inspired by abstract expressionism as much as by surrealism, have been exhibited for the past ten years from London to Chicago, via Stavanger, Barcelona, Berlin, San Francisco, Moscow and Paris.