Often referred to as “The Fresh Prince of Street Art,” Skyler Grey (b. 2000, Los Angeles) defines Contemporary Pop Art for a new century. His bold figurations freely appropriate iconography such as Mickey Mouse, Popeye and Batman alongside luxury brands Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Hermes. These maximalist compositions deftly combine silk-screens, acrylic, spraypaint and surfaces flocked with diamond dust. While the legacies of artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring inform Grey’s practice, he experiments with upending traditional notions of painting and presentation in a singular vocabulary which speaks to his experience as a young Black male in modern America. Grey’s series America the Beautiful, which stemmed from the social-political climate of 2020, was situated as a two-act body of work drawing on comic book heroes and champions of the Saturday morning cartoon.

More recently, Grey has ventured into sculpture-making at a level comparable to that of his Contemporary-Pop peers Takashi Murakami, KAWS, and Jeff Koons. He extracts characters and motifs from his paintings, such as Mickey Lagerfeld and Chanel-clad Olive Oyl, and translates them into vibrant, candy-colored sculptures. Grey also dives into the world of Abstraction with his series inspired by Mark Rothko, showing the evolving maturity of the young artist’s practice. Following a visit to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, Grey has taken on this body of work as an homage to the color field studies of the great Modernist painter.

Grey found his way to art by way of catharsis. Enrolled in art classes at an early age following his mother’s untimely death, Grey funnels raw emotion into the stock imagery of consumerism. In 2019, he was commissioned to design and paint a unique Aventador S model by the Italian luxury sports automobile brand, Lamborghini. Only 19 years old at the time, he is the only artist to have ever touched a brush to a Lamborghini vehicle, let alone “the first legal street art on wheels” (Forbes Magazine, 2019). Grey’s work has been exhibited extensively at Avant Gallery (Miami and New York), at the Norton Museum of Art (Palm Beach, Florida), Trace Gallery (Switzerland), Graffik Gallery (London). In 2022 Grey participated in his first major auction via Sotheby’s.