STIK | UNTITLED

A gift from the artist to the present owner

Playfully arranged stick figures populate the bright tangerine orange background in this maquette for a mural conceived by the Hackney based street-artist Stik. Known for his monumental graffiti art and much-celebrated community projects, Stik has left his mark on cities around the world, from Osaka to Gdansk. Executed in 2010, the present work is a study for a permanent mural in East London commissioned by British Waterways to promote cycle safety. Stik’s work combines his self-taught fine art sensibility with an aesthetic effortlessness that is rooted in his unorthodox approach to public art: unassuming figures consisting of six lines and two dots are the quickest way to draw a human figure without risking being caught. Stik’s experience as an artist’s life model allowed him to merge his expressive agility with the norms of classical composition, which he fused with the Japanese calligraphic characters known as kanji, to create his instantly recognisable and aesthetically vibrant street-art iconography. The present work embodies Stik’s conscious and carefully considered approach to public spaces that skillfully relates the work to the local community. The street is Stik’s medium, and as such the present work encapsulates the artist’s revered, poetically sober and simplistic style that has resulted in an exponentially increasing market value of the very limited number of pieces by Stik available on the secondary market.