Maxwell Colette Gallery is proud to present Transition, a solo show from the renowned Dutch graffiti artist DOES. The exhibition features recent mixed media paintings on canvas, including large scale work up to 18 feet in length. This will be the artist’s first solo show in Chicago and debut exhibition with the gallery.
Transition presents a body of text-based paintings where words are visually imploded and reconstituted as aggregations of disarticulated, smoldering letterforms. These compositions seem to levitate in space, dripping and melting away at their edges into the painting’s etherial, minimalist backgrounds. DOES portrays the forms with incredible accuracy and attention to detail; rendering them nearly hyper-realistic. His technical mastery is stunning, and the paintings push beyond the boundaries of traditional graffiti into a more conceptual and painterly territory where shapes and colors assume narrative and present reflections of our frenetic post-modern society.
Though traditional letterforms remain his passion, Transition finds DOES exploring new ground both visually and conceptually. The artist explains: “while my roots are in graffiti, I don’t like to limit myself to only one discipline. I think it’s more interesting to take elements from different movements and incorporate them into my work.” As the title implies, the paintings in Transition are the result of a period of heightened creative development, and provide an exciting glimpse into his unique aesthetic evolution.
Email us for a preview of available work: gallery@maxwellcolette.com