News

We are beginning to prepare for My Dog Sighs' arrival to Chicago! Here is a video he produced a couple years ago to start getting you ready.

For his debut US solo show, London-based graffiti artist Xenz focused his body of work on the underworld of Chicago, as described in "The Outfit" by Gus Russo. Click here to read the full description of the exhibition. Xenz also wanted to give back to the local Chicago arts scene. While at an antique market in Andersonville, he found a vintage cigar box that had a hole cut in the top to use as a bank. A cigar box... a bank... the underworld... perfect for an Al Capone dollar bill, and for 100% of the proceeds to be given to the Chicago-based non-profit The Simple Good.

The raffle will go through the length of the exhibition. Tickets may be purchased at the gallery, or you may send money through PayPal as a gift, and we will email you your raffle ticket number. Tickets are $5 each, 3 for $10, or 7 for $20. For PayPal entries, send payment to patrick@verticalgallery.com, and include your name, phone number and email address. We will email you a confirmation and ticket numbers.

Description:

Xenz
Cicero, 2014
Acrylic and 22-carat gold-leaf painted box, with ink on one dollar bill.
Signed by Xenz

Winner will be drawn at random on July 26. Winner will be contacted by email, and we will publish the winners name on our blog after they have been contacted. Please contact Patrick at Vertical Gallery if you have any questions.

While Stinkfish spent 3 weeks in Chicago working on his solo show Savage Gaze (on view through May 31, 2014), he also had time to paint a couple murals. On Damen in Ukrainian Village, Pawn Works helped secure this prime location.

Pawn Works also helped organize a mural for Stinkfish in Pilsen as part of their Art in Public Places initiative. This is located on 16th Street near Halsted.

After the opening of his exhibition, Stinkfish went to New York City for the first time and definitely put his mark around the city! 

Vertical Gallery's one-year anniversary show, PAPER JAM, is curated by artist Ben Frost. Listen to Ben talk about the exhibition and discuss a few of the artists. All 17 artists will be featured over three videos. In this video: Anthony Lister, Greg Gossel, Mark Drew, Bridge Stehli, Michael Cain, and Collin Van Der Sluijs.

Collin Van Der Sluijs (NL)
At the age of 12 he attended the school for traditional painting in Goes, the Netherlands where he studied the old techniques from painting and theory. In 1996 he graduated and was accepted for a 4 years painting and graphic education at St.Lucas in Boxtel, the Netherlands. In 2000 he graduated the art-academy St. Joost in Breda, the Netherlands. He studied illustration for 4 years and graduated with a bachelor-title in 2004. His work can be described as personal pleasures and struggles in daily life, translated in his own visual language. The work from Collin van der Sluijs has been published in magazines, books, and shown in galleries and project-spaces or walls in The Netherlands, Germany, France, England, Belgium, The U.S.A, Luxembourg, Italy, United Kingdom, Spain.

Greg Gossel (USA)
Greg was born in 1982 in western Wisconsin. With a background in design, his work is an expressive interplay of many diverse words, images, and gestures. Gossel’s multi-layered work illustrates a visual history of change and process throughout each piece. His work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and abroad, including San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Copenhagen, and London. His commercial clients include Levi's, Burton Snowboards, Stussy, VICE Magazine, and Interscope Records while his work has been published in The San Francisco Chronicle, Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine, Artslant, and ROJO Magazine. Greg currently resides in Minneapolis, MN.

Michael Cain (AUS)
Michael is an artist working out of Melbourne, Australia. His artwork is derived from an affinity with birds and animals, and his exposure to them through pop culture and real life experiences. His quirky, abstracted characters are created with loose, fluid brushstrokes and a vivid colour palette that immerses you in their world and makes you smile.

Mark Drew (AUS)
Mark Drew is an Australian graphic artist, and co-founder of Sydney's China Heights Gallery. He has been based in Tokyo since 2009.

Bridge Stehli (AUS)
Bridge is an internationally celebrated artist, exhibiting across Australia, Europe and the USA. She was co-curator and founder of the acclaimed Paste modernism exhibition in Sydney and has been featured in numerous publications including Empty, C.O.P and Curvy. Bridge has recently combined her loves for painting and skateboarding into a range of skateboard decks and has produced murals across Australia and London. Originally from Sydney, Bridge Stehli currently is based in London. By referencing some of her early influences, specifically writers such as Lewis Carol and cartoons from Disney and Warner Bros, Bridge explores the importance of animal personification within classical and contemporary culture and how some of these fictitious anthropomorphised figures relate to, impact and comment on the physical world.

Anthony Lister (AUS)
One of Australia's most renowned contemporary artists, Lister's work presents us with a grimy fusion of high and lowbrow culture with influences from a number of areas and genres, including street art, expressionism, pop art, and contemporary youth culture, often drawing from television and the "misguided role models" that result. Revelling in the “spirituality”, and the “heritage” of Western popular culture he takes this joint legacy and remoulds it into something equally alluring and grotesque, a perfect representation of the society he seeks to depict. Taking influence from the dirtier and rough techniques of “Bad” Painting and merging it with the spirit and practices of graffiti art Lister has embraced an explosive, scratchy, scrawling form of figurative art using a variety of mediums from painting, drawing and installation to film and music.

Special thanks to Loosey Goosey Art for producing all of the PAPER JAM videos!

Vertical Gallery's one-year anniversary show, PAPER JAM, is curated by artist Ben Frost. Listen to Ben talk about the exhibition and discuss a few of the artists. All 17 artists will be featured over three videos. In this video: Dale Keogh, Mysterious Al, Taylor White, Ben Frost, Denial, and Denialex.

Taylor White (US)
Taylor White is an active producer of fine pictorial convention. With a background in illustration, her work can be found in print, in urban gallery spaces, on city streets, and in public and private collections. Taylor is currently based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Mysterious Al (UK)
Mysterious Al is a London based artist, illustrator and designer who creates iconic gothic / pop imagery. Initially drawing inspiration from illustration icons such as Jamie Hewlett, James Jarvis and Pete Fowler, as well as his graffiti and art-school peers, Mysterious Al's characters are monsters, mutants and subhumans... Creatures that inhabit a dark yet playful universe parallel to our own. In 2001, alongside friend and contemporary D*Face, Mysterious Al co-founded the now world-renowed 'Finders Keepers Crew'; a collective of young outsider artists using stickers, wheat-paste and found objects to create illegal street installations. The Finders Keepers crew gained international notoriety and found themselves at the forefront of a new art movement: 'Street-art'. Their widely attended yet illegal pop-up exhibitions formed an often replicated template for promoting the biggest art trend in a decade whilst the roster of artists associated with Finders Keepers went on to become some of the biggest names in this new movement.

Dale Keogh (AUS)
Dale Keogh creates colorful, slightly gruesome and twisted illustrations using color pencil on black backgrounds. With a deft eye for contrast and texture, his guy combines hyper-realism with surrealism like no other.

Denial (CANADA)
Daniel Bombardier is a Canadian graffiti and mixed-media artist. His moniker 'Denial', by definition, pokes fun at modern advertising, politics, and media messages that society is often “in denial” about. He is known for his prolific guerrilla-marketing campaign, which takes public aim at ideas involving social-justice, pop-culture, mass-media, and “New World Order” conspiracy theories.

Ben Frost (AUS)
Australian artist Ben Frost is known for his kaleidoscopic Pop Art, mash-up paintings that take inspiration from areas as diverse as graffiti, collage, photorealism and sign-writing. By subverting mainstream iconography from the worlds of advertising, entertainment and politics, he creates a visual framework that is bold, confronting and often controversial. He has been exhibiting throughout Australia and internationally over the last 12 years, including solo shows in London, New York, Toronto, Singapore and San Francisco, as well as group shows in Beijing, Mongolia, Amsterdam, and Berlin.