ARTIST
Speedy Graphito
France
A precursor to the avant-garde and recognized as one of the pioneers of the French “Street Art” movement (Urban Contemporary Art), today Speedy Graphito is internationally one of the major figures of his generation.
Speedy Graphito was Born in 1961. He lives and works in Paris and Los Angeles. Back in the 1980s he was part of the stencil artists group X-Moulinex. 1984 he presented his first gallery exhibition using the name „Speedy Graphito“. Besides his urban background he already was taught painting at the age of nine. He grew up in an environment where Vincent van Gogh, Maurice de Vlaminck and Georges Rouault were common terms. In 1983 he graduated from Estienne Art School and decided to devote himself fully to painting. Throughout 30 years of artistic career Speedy Graphito has traversed maturation and therefore perfected his technique in divers media as paintings, drawings, sculptures aswell as installations. His wolrdwide artistic success is crowned by the first retrospective exhibition Un Art De Vivre at the Touquet Museum in Le Touquet-Paris-Plage (FR).
Globalization, art marketing, art history, art market, omnipresence of images, imagery and codes of collective memory are the main concerns that Speedy Graphito wants to express and visualize in his works of art. The artist strongly stresses that while the pieces of art will continue to exist as a pure product if conception, his mind remains a vagabond – free and proud of its being.
