Logan Hicks: The Story of My Life
January 26, 2016
Logan Hicks is a New York-based artist known for his photorealistic stenciled paintings. Studying at the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art in the early 1990s, Hicks cut his teeth as a successful screen printer, before being inspired to branch into stencils. Hicks was inspired move to California to align with the Low Brow movement of the 90s, and concentrate on his fine art stencil work. Hicks relocated to Brooklyn in 2007 to continue his fine art.
Called a painter with a photographer’s eye, Hicks’ work has largely focused on the perception of the environment, at times humanizing its architectural angles and structures, and at others using its vastness to explore self identity. With an old masters approach to lighting, Hicks sculpts ordinary architectural scenes into deeply metaphorical and contemplative imagery through stenciled aerosol.
In recent years, the artist has delved further into his own metaphorical language, bringing in themes like water to create dream-like imagery that explores his own meditative contemplation on the world that surrounds us. Hicks has also translated a history of decorative and cultural patterns into his stencil pieces, furthering the obscured reality created by patterns by incorporating them into photorealist stencil.s To Hicks, patterns are an extension of light, hiding reality the same way trees cast shadows on the forest floor.
Hicks’ introspective imagery is pushed from sullen to vibrant to enigmatic, with his expert use of color and meticulous control of the spray can. Over the years, Hicks has developed his impeccable photorealistic style using stencils, sometimes using up to 15 layers of stencil to achieve this precision. Working from his own photographs, subjects are translated to multiple layers of stencils, brought to bold dimensionality by blending colors through aerosol.
Hicks’ mastery has gained him world-wide respect, and given the artist opportunity to create large scale murals in Istanbul, Miami, Baltimore, New York, Tunisia, Paris and beyond.
Logan Hicks' most recent series, "Sorry Margareta," is far more complex than your average still life. Inspired by the story of Margareta Haverman's struggle for equality in the art world, Hicks pays homage to an artist overlooked by her peers.
This year’s fair highlights include artist Logan Hicks, who is being honored with the fourth Art Wynwood Tony Goldman Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award, which will be presented by Nick Korniloff, Vice President, Art Miami, and Jessica Goldman, CEO, Goldman Global Arts, during a private four-course dinner at the brand new Boulud Sud on Friday, February 16th.
Logan Hicks was selected to paint the famous Bowery Wall (on Houston St.), and has just completed it over the weekend. A huge honor for street artists and New York-based artists alike, the wall was once painted by Keith Haring, and has recently been painted by well-known artists such as Swoon, Kenny Scharf, Ron English and others...
