Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1957, Dan Witz has had one of the longest spanning careers of any street artist to date. Active since the 1970s, Witz is perhaps best known for his tongue-in-cheek trompe l’oeil stickers and paste-ups, which have graced the walls of many urban centres, including ‘Holes’ his 1990s poster series which imaged illusory openings onto Brooklyn’s city surfaces.
Today, Witz focuses on his pioneering painting techniques, which merge the traditional with the digital, and take their inspiration from his native New York City. His process unfolds in layers: beginning with self-taken digital photographs, Witz uses photoshop to create artistic edits, before printing the images to canvas as achromatic under-paintings. Like the Dutch renaissance masters, Witz finishes his paintings by applying colour with traditional glazing techniques, which work to create the illusion of depth, light and shadow. With their contemporary subject matter, Witz’s paintings deftly straddle the old and the new, for a truly unique, twenty-first century aesthetic.
Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1957, Dan Witz has had one of the longest spanning careers of any street artist to date. Active since the 1970s, Witz is perhaps best known for his tongue-in-cheek trompe l’oeil stickers and paste-ups, which have graced the walls of many urban centres, including ‘Holes’ his 1990s poster series which imaged illusory openings onto Brooklyn’s city surfaces.
Today, Witz focuses on his pioneering painting techniques, which merge the traditional with the digital, and take their inspiration from his native New York City. His process unfolds in layers: beginning with self-taken digital photographs, Witz uses photoshop to create artistic edits, before printing the images to canvas as achromatic under-paintings. Like the Dutch renaissance masters, Witz finishes his paintings by applying colour with traditional glazing techniques, which work to create the illusion of depth, light and shadow. With their contemporary subject matter, Witz’s paintings deftly straddle the old and the new, for a truly unique, twenty-first century aesthetic.
