ARTIST
Nasty
France
Nasty is a notorious French street artist who is best known for his enamel signs of the RATP (Paris subway) he has been using for more than 25 years. Nasty belongs to second generation of Parisian graffiti artists. At the age of thirteen he began to spray for the first time. In 1988 he marked walls and metros with his lettering and so made himself a name in the French graffiti scene. Along with his contemporaries he strongly influenced and defined the codes of the Parisian graffiti subculture in the 90ies.
Soon Nasty noticed that he always preferred and practiced more „artistic vandalism“ that the act of vandalism itself. Therefore Nasty began to kidnapped outdated or unused subway signs, which he transformed into artful objects using his spray cans and his particular lettering style. His artistic work since 1988 was recorded in the Book “Nasty and Slice, Artists On The Run”. 2009 the cultural channel Arte has produced a documentary of the Nasty’s work on the streets of Paris. So far prestigious galleries and institutions have exposed his work, as for example Danisz Magda Gallery, Palais de Chaillot, the Galerie Hélène Bailly, the Grand Palais or the Musée en Herbe.
Nasty found his creativity especially in spraying metro plans and ceramic tiles from Parisian subways. Thus he gave the streets, trains and subways some new calligraphic style and colorful life. His style is characterized by bright colors, as pink, purple or blue, to break the boring gray or white of the public buildings. To interrupt the monotony of urban walls his throw ups diverge from the vertical as well as the horizontal construction dimensions of the walls. Therefore passengers recognizes his distinctive style in his throw ups. Still using the classical materials such as metro maps, signs, tiles and flat pressed spray cans and his notorious calligraphic lettering he keeps the graffiti spirit alive and yet comes up with new as well as unique pieces.