PAUL INSECT
UNITED KINGDOM
BIOGRAPHY
Paul Insect is a UK contemporary artist, who is most famous for his 2007 solo show Bullion exhibition at London's Art gallery, Lazarides Gallery. Damien Hirst is reported to be a fan of Insect, having purchased the show days before it opened. Insect, who also goes by the name of PINS, worked alongside artist Banksy at the Cans Festival, the Santa's Ghetto project in Bethlehem, and on the separation wall in Palestine
Insect’s slick and lively mixed-media works demonstrate the desire to reveal and to hide. The high-profile, reclusive artist, who has sold for upwards of $50,000 at Sotheby’s, is part of an illustrious street art clan alongside the notorious and ever-illusive, Banksy. Insect’s bracing paintings are a collision of colour, line and enshrouded faces with clear references to Dada, Pop Art and graffiti. Anonymous eyes, lips and noses are buried behind swabs of bright primary colours, and bold patterns are collaged and painted onto his canvases. However, behind the energetic compositions and colour palette, a deeper and more pernicious sentiment is veiled: semi-masked expressions unsure as to whether they are trapped inside the confines of the canvas through force or consent.
In addition to his 2D works, Insect’s eclectic collection of puppets are part of the artist’s ongoing collaboration with New York street artist, Bast. Inverting the covered anonymous faces of Insect’s paintings, the duo’s bright, low-fi satire riffs off eminent societal archetypes: the cop, the robber, the pop star, the rapper, the disenfranchised youth. At Banksy’s acclaimed and critically controversial Dismaland in 2015, Insect and Bast’s Fly Tip Theatre was exhibited. The work, made entirely out of objects found in Hackney skips, consisted of four puppets that the audience were able to control from a bar above. With dubstep playing in plain daylight as the puppets jolted and thrusted their gangly limbs—comic timing all too familiar to the has-been partygoers and jaded ravers—Insect and Bast presented a culturally nuanced satire executed with immaculate wit and vision.
EXHIBITIONS
EDUCATION
∙ Graphic Design - Hastings and Salisbury Art Colleges