Crash / Letting Ink Dry — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 5, 2012 → February 28, 2013

Street-art pioneer, Crash exposes all over the world. For this first solo exhibition at galerie Wallworks, he shows 34 recent watercolors which includes his universe inspired by American comics and Pop Art, as well as ten paintings on canvas, emblematic of its production of the 1980s to the 2000s.

Born in 1961 in New York, John Matos took the name of Crash in the mid-1970s and began writing graffiti, at the age of 13, on the subway from the Bronx lines. In 1979, he joined the artists Kel, Daze, Zephyr, Dondi and Futura in the Graffiti Studio, a project funded by the collector Sam Esses, who let them jump to the canvas. They all attend the mythical Fashion Moda, established in 1978 by Stefan Eins, the place to be in New York where you could meet, among others, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer and many graffiti artists. In 1980, Crash organized the exhibition at the prescient title "GAS: Graffiti Art Success”. Success is indeed such that the same year, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan resumed the exhibition, slightly revised and entitled “Events, Fashion Moda”. The exhibitions presented at Fashion Moda then attracted the attention of the American and European galleries, contributing to the growth of the graffiti movement.

From 1983, and for nearly a decade, Crash is represented by the Sydney Janis Gallery in New York, sharing the rails with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. At the end of 1984, he was invited to participate in the exhibition “Figuration Libre 5/5, France/USA” at the Museum of modern art in Paris.

Crash works have been exhibited throughout the United States — as well as in Spain, France and the Netherlands — and have been acquired by an impressive number of public and private collections around the world such as the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA in New York, the Cornell Museum in Florida, the Rubell Collection in Miami, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam…