Modern Living, 2018

Faile   Emerging artists

FAILE is the name of a group of painters, graphic designers and illustrators based in New York. The group was founded by Patrick McNeil, an American born in 1975 in California and Patrick Miller, a Canadian born in 1976, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The two artists met in high school and together created the group FAILE in 1999. In 2000, the then art students in New York, met Japanese artist Aiko Nakagawa who joined the group in 2006. They discovered together the New York underground culture and became passionated about this universe.

The group started its urban art project by photgraphing street art and grafitti works already existing on the streets of New York. Then little by little, they learned the techniques of street art: serigraphy, stencils, collages, painting, sculpture, mosaic frescoes....... They exhibited their work on the walls of the city and came back to contemplate the effect of the time on their craations: they like the ephemeral side of their work and the sensation of freedom they have during the creation. In order to attract attention to their work at the beginning, they did 100 posters of naked women which they posted everywhere on the streets of Manhattan. Their purpose was to arose the curiosity of the passersby and create mystery. The street art made by FAILE is more feminine and contrasts with the graffiti culture of their times. They particularly like vintage images, pop culture and comics. They are influenced by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Basquiat.

The group travels and exports their work everywhere around the world to Tokyo, Paris, London, Barcelona, Madrid, Berlin, Amsterdam and Lisbon where they posed collages, stencils and did giant frescoes. For almost 15 years, the group FAILE has been diffusing its street art, and in 2003 they finally did two solo exhibitions, one in London and another one in Tokyo.