Enigmatic British graffiti artist who uses the alias STIK, pictured with one of his instantly-recognisable stick figure creations.
British graffiti artist STIK has become known for his distinctive, minimalist stick figure art which explores themes of social injustice, inequality and community. Though he’s only risen to prominence in the past 15 years or so, STIK has firmly established himself as one of the leading and most influential street artists alive today, having been compared to the likes of Banksy and Keith Haring.
STIK’s recent surge in popularity has also led to his work fetching high prices at auction; though he primarily creates murals, STIK is also a prolific printmaker, and prints in fact account for over 80% of his work sold at auction. They usually fetch between £1,000 and £5,000, though a significant proportion of them have fetched prices up to £50,000.
Like many graffiti artists, STIK is very guarded about his personal life and his real identity. Despite this, he’s fairly open about his work, and some facts are known about his life. Therefore, below are five things you might not have known about STIK.
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He Was Homeless
Not long before becoming a world-famous artist, STIK was homeless for a period of time, sleeping rough, sofa-surfing, or squatting by turns, and he was living in St Mungo’s hostel as he prepared for his first gallery show in 2011. The artist explained “you fall through the cracks and it’s tough to get back up”, and he’s said that “street art was my way of giving back to the people who helped me.”
His rise to fame was impressively fast; 2011 was also the year STIK travelled to Gdansk in Poland to paint two murals (one solo, and one with young artists from the local community). The mural was subsequently stealthily removed, cut into sections, and sold off by a London gallery, a move STIK publicly condemned. The mural painted with the community was eventually returned after years of campaigning, and STIK publicly destroyed the pieces that had been retrieved from his solo artwork. All that remains of it are the prints based on sections of the mural, such as Gdansk 16.
His Most Expensive Prints Sold For £160,000
Liberty is a series of prints based on a 60-foot mural STIK created in 2013 in Tompkins Square, New York. The stick figure emulates the iconic pose of the Statue of Liberty, and its raised right hand echoes the symbol of the raised fist, usually associated with solidarity and resistance. The location of the mural was no accident; Tompkins Square has a long history of being a site of riots and civil disobedience, and STIK’s mural is a testament to “the persistence of community, but also its frailty.”
The Liberty screenprints based on the mural are extremely popular in today’s market, and even individual prints from the series fetch high prices at auction; one set of five was sold by Christie’s in September 2019 for £160,000, STIK’s highest print price to date.
Liberty (Set of 5) sold by Christie’s in 2019
He Lived In Japan
According to STIK, he lived in Japan for nearly one year in his late teens; the experience had a profound effect on him, with the artist saying he “picked up this style of drawing, which is closely connected to writing as a shorthand for conveying emotion”, and his signature stick figure style “developed from there.”
The influence of Japanese culture is clear to see in STIK’s work in other ways, too; his Onbu (Piggyback) prints, for instance, were based on The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, a famous series of ukiyo-e woodcut prints created by Utagawa Hiroshige, one of Japan’s best and most influential artists.
He Created The UK’s Tallest Mural
In 2014, STIK unveiled a 14-storey, 125-foot mural on the side of Charles Hocking House, a condemned social housing tower block in West London. Astonishingly, he painted the entire thing by hand using an airless compressor. As with much of STIK’s work – including Onbu (Piggyback) and Lovers – the mural features embracing, intertwined figures. In this case, the artist chose a mother holding a small child and staring forlornly down across London from the condemned tower block.
Until the building was torn down in 2018, Big Mother was the tallest mural in the UK, and it made a salient point about Britain’s housing crisis. In STIK’s own words, “Social housing in Britain is under threat. This piece is to remind the world that all people need homes.” Although the main mural has been destroyed, a local charity managed to salvage the much smaller version of it that STIK painted at the base of the structure. It was subsequently sold at auction, with the proceeds going to community charities.
STIK Mural in West London
He’s A Philanthropist
Having been through hard times himself, STIK has made a concerted effort in his art to “give a voice to marginalised communities”: he is centrally involved in numerous projects to help young, emerging artists, and he frequently collaborates with different charities and homeless organisations. STIK often donates proceeds from his artwork to different causes, too, and he’s helped several foundations by creating art specifically for them, which has both publicised their aims and raised money for them.
In STIK’s own words, his artwork is, ultimately, about stating: “We are still here. We’ve not gone yet. We’re hanging on.’’ And, with his art now on display around the globe, it’s a message which he’s certainly succeeded in broadcasting loudly and clearly.
