Graham Wilson

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Born in 1987 to a low
income family in Kentucky, Graham Wilson is an American contemporary artist who
has lived and worked in New York since the age of sixteen. Today he is all the
rage and his pieces are in demand all over the world, but less than five years
ago he was still living in poverty. He slept in his studio lit by candlelight
and without heating, sleeping on a mattress as thin as cigarette paper and breathing
the toxic fumes from his paints.

As a child Wilson lived
with his mother in a mobile home, later dropping out of school to sell drugs in
an attempt to earn some money. He quickly ran into trouble with the police, and
once released fled to the Big Apple where it became clear that he couldn’t
escape poverty just by running from it.

There’s an irony in the
fact that his days of hard labour and destitution were responsible for the
glory and fame he now enjoys. Picked up and offered support by a gallery
director who admired his work, Wilson was granted his first exhibition in a pop
up store. Every single piece was bought and his ratings took off.

Now, the thirtysomething can comfortably
make a living from his art as he is represented by three major American and
European galleries and his canvases are exhibited across the world.

Wilson is constantly seeking to develop his technique,
in part guided by his inspirations: Willem de Kooning and Cy Twomby. He started
his career in neo-expressionism, but this wasn’t the success he had hoped for
so he destroyed the pieces, slicing them into strips which he then used to give
birth to a totally new creation. He took all the little pieces of his old
paintings and cut them into squares and strips which he sanded down and re-coloured
by launching paints from above (paint bombing). The final colourful patchwork
resembles the work of Jackson Pollock, a similarity that Wilson has honoured
with his famous cycle of ‘strip paintings’.