One of Supertouch’s favorite promising Brooklyn-based artists is DAN WITZ, a classical painter who straddles the very disparate worlds of “fine” and “Street Art” with incredibly unique and separate bodies of work. Coming to prominence recently with a series of photorealistic “mosh pit” oil paintings, Witz has also made a home for his work in the streets with an incredible ongoing series of trompe l’oeil -style mixed media painted photo appliqués that depict his renditions of people imprisoned behind immovable grates and vents that are applied to the sides of, in Witz’s words, “ugly new buildings” as a sort of personal commentary on the dismal state of modern architecture and gentrification throughout the rapidly changing landscapes of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. His recent series, the amazingly titled “Kilroy Variations: Ugly New Buildings” exists mainly on the sides of the forest of new condo buildings that make up the bulk of the borough’s new urban development. In the artist’s words:

“In the past few years much of my neighborhood in Brooklyn has been torn down to make way for luxury housing. For better or worse it’s a whole new street-scape out here. Personally, I can’t say I like the new modern architecture very much, it’s sterile and so arrogantly disconnected with its surroundings sometimes it seems like giant alien space ships have landed in the night. But, at the very least, there’s some interesting new textures and surfaces to interact with. These are photo-based, heavily re-painted stickers, mounted on plastic and glued to the walls of the Ugly New Buildings. I hit the Lower East Side and East Village in Manhattan, and Bushwick, Dumbo, Greenpoint and Williamsburg out here in Brooklyn.”
HAVE A LOOK:

Self-portrait of the artist as Kilroy…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 6:13 am and is filed under Brooklyn, Feature, Graffiti, NYC, News, Street Art, art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.