Brooklyn, New York based artist Dan Witz, featured here, has been producing activist street art around the world since the seventies. His provocative interventions feature images that trick the eye and often, the majority of people don’t notice them right away. He plans to take his art to London next with his latest project, “Breathing Room”, an ambitious undertaking where he will install his signature-illusionistic paintings in the city’s iconic red phone booths.
To Brooklyn, New York based artist Dan Witz, the mosh pit is a place of savage beauty. Featured here on our blog, the longtime street artist, who was in his own punk band, combines his passion for art and the energy of the hardcore music scene in his “Mosh Pit” series. He slows down the chaos of the nightclub from the musician’s perspective into paintings that are strangely primal, focused on both the private and collective experience.
Over the weekend at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in Chelsea, New York, the Brooklyn-based artist Dan Witz opened his solo exhibition “NY Hardcore,” a mosh pit series intricately depicted in a hyper-realistic, trompe l’oeil technique with oil and digital media. The displayed works are all so purposely consistent — not just in medium, but through the unbound emotions splattered across Witz’s many colliding punk youths. One piece bleeds into another, allowing the viewer to escape into New York City’s adrenaline-spiked past.
Dan Witz recently arrived in Rome and embarked on a series of street art projects on the days leading up to his solo show at Wunderkammern, “Public and Confidential” (previewed here). A deft photorealist painter, Witz investigates collective behavior and the boundaries between what we consider public and private. For his latest street installations, Witz affixed grates and windows to doorways and facades on the streets of Rome, hiding confrontational portraits behind the fixtures to surprise passersby. Giorgio Coen Cagli went along for the journey and brought us this photo series of Witz at work. See more after the jump.
Dan Witz uses hyperrealism as a means of confrontation, tapping into the darker human impulses with imagery that is symbolic yet easily accessible. An early pioneer of street art, Witz uses his unconventional approach to spark philosophical dialogues about war, violence, privacy and power. The artist has a solo show titled “Public and Confidential” at Wunderkammern in Rome coming up on September 28, on view through November 16. Witz will travel to Italy for the occasion to do some pieces on the street the week leading up to the opening and collaborate on a video with Amnesty International. Take a look at our sneak peek of some of the works in the show after the jump.
Hi-Fructose got a chance to take a peek into the hyper realistic world of Dan Witz. Inspired by punk music and graffiti in the late ’70s, the Brooklyn-based artist has been painting and doing street art, all the while traveling the world. In his 30-plus years of making art, Witz has built his career by virtually staying under the radar. In the early ’80s when he was attending Cooper Union, he saw art as “an agent of change,” but was disillusioned by the commercial art world. He saw it as “exclusive, elitist and kind of boring.” Read more about our studio visit with Dan Witz and see some exclusive photos after the jump!