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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.

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: Chris Cunningham, Numskull, Hebru Brantley, James Jirat Patradoon, Sharktoof, and Copyright.

View all available artwork from PAPER JAM

Read about the featured artists in this video:

Chris Cunningham (IRELAND)
Chris Cunningham is a UK based artist working exclusively with spray-paint and contemporary stencil techniques. His work explores the ideas of contemporary pop culture and mass media as they affect and shape how we operate in our daily lives. References to pop culture, graffiti, skateboard graphics and comic book iconography feature heavily alongside the instantly recognizable logos and the symbols of our time, exploring the effect they have on our society. Often these symbols are subverted and reworked to convey a message or expose an underlying issue. His commentary of pop culture, bold graphics and strong use of colour is similar to that of Lichtenstein or Warhol but with a contemporary urban edge. The work he makes is exhibited internationally and can just as often be found painted on found objects as it can on linen and canvas.

Copyright (UK)
Over the last decade Copyright has been invited to show his work worldwide including sell out solo shows in London and Tokyo and most recently his Precious Damage show which saw him sell all 50 works in 3 hours. He was asked to design the cover of Reload Magazine to go alongside a feature about his art, as well as pieces in Harpers Bazaar, Teen Vogue and Modart amongst others. He was featured on Series 8 of the BBC show ‘The Apprentice’ in May 2012 after being selected by the contestants as part of a task based on street art. His highly stylised work and unique style has proven popular with both national and international collectors including a number of celebrities and Premier League footballers.

Sharktoof (USA)
Shark Toof ranks among street art's most recognizable artists. Known for his murals, stencils and wheat pastes on streets across the US from NY to Miami to LA, Shark Toof is one of the rising stars in contemporary street art. Shark Toof currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo and group shows in 2010 include Baker's Dozen, Fountain Art Fair, Miami; Dreams Deferred, Chinese American Museum of Los Angeles; Duality, CB Gallery, Los Angeles; Marxist Glue, Hold Up Art, Los Angeles; Small Gift Sanrio 50th Anniversary, Barker Hanger, Los Angeles; Sugi Pop, Portsmouth Museum of Art, New Hampshire; Unfaithful Forever, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; Dead Letter Playground, Leo Kesting Gallery, New York; Viva Lost Wages, Joseph Watson Collection, Las Vegas; MAYDAY, Barracuda, Los Angeles and Crazy 4 Cult, Gallery 1988, Los Angeles. Shark Toof graduated from Pasadena Art Center College of Design with a BFA in Illustration.

James Jirat Patradoon (AUS)
James (born 1985) is an Australian Artist/Illustrator. He creates character driven visual art, born of fictional worlds of borrowed imagery that act as distorted mirrors to our reality, mashed-up and remixed to create new stories. Inspired by the fashion and costume of black metal music, gangster rap, professional wrestling, sci-fi films, and superheroes, James' work is an irreverent take on the stoic nature of macho pop culture.

Numskull (AUS)
Numskull is an Australian based artist, working out of Sydney in a variety of fields and mediums including painting, sculpture, illustration and large scale murals. Now showing constantly in galleries, his painting style has evolved from simple street work to complex, technical and reactive mixed media paintings and sculpture. His unique imagery has become a collage of study focusing on color hierarchy, typography, abstract heroism and idolism within modern contemporary culture.

Hebru Brantley (USA)
Hebru, a Bronzeville-native living and working in Chicago, explores personal and cultural memory in his art. Taking themes from his 1980’s upbringing, Brantley uses a creative process akin to free-form journaling, using a variety of surfaces and media including wood, spray paint, coffee and tea. His work delves into political and social issues with a conscious focus on playful insight and the optimism and possibilities of youth. Brantley draws influence from an array of pop culture icons, comic book heroes, Japanese anime and the bold aesthetics of street art pioneers Jean Michel Basquiat, Kaws and Keith Haring. Brantley’s recent focus is to share energetic narratives— moments of reality from his life and the lives of his peers, mixed with fantastical fiction— to create a fragmented environment of make believe. Spray paint is often at the forefront of these mixed-media illustrations, working in part to decontextualize the levity of cartoon imagery, and bring a critical edge into the white cube. From this, Brantley has developed his own unique style and identifies as an Afro-Futurist. Recognized nationally for public works and solo shows in Chicago, Hebru Brantley has exhibited in San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami, Seattle, Los Angeles and New York. He was most recently the winner of the Redbull Curates Chicago contest, and will exhibit at Scope art fair in December 2012. Brantley has been commissioned by Skyy Vodka, Nike and Tyra Banks. Film from Clark Atlanta University, and has a background in design and media illustration.

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.