Lady Savage – SPEEDY GRAPHITO

Speedy Graphito is now a “historic” artist, a monument of his generation. Emerging from the narrative figuration movement of the 1980s, he has long been recognized as one of the pioneers of contemporary urban art and contemporary art “tout court.” His career, numerous museum exhibitions, and public commissions have established him as a “great,” an essential artist.

Despite his status as a major artist, despite numerous auction price records, despite his omnipresence in museums, he has retained his reflexes and habits as a pioneering artist: his creativity is intact and as incredible and surprising as ever. Speedy never stops imagining, daring, and innovating. It’s in his DNA. He recently completed a year-long exhibition that was an incredible success at the Musée en Herbe in Paris. In 2024, after a solo show at Polaris, he will exhibit from September to the end of December at the world’s first floating urban art center, Fluctuart, curated by the ART FIVE Gallery.

Let’s go back to the beginnings of his career, when he graduated from the École d’Art Estienne in Paris in 1983 at the age of 22. It was during this period that he created his first stencils on the streets with the group X Moulinex and began painting under the pseudonym Speedy Graphito.

Since the early 1980s, Speedy Graphito has left his mark on the collective memory and walls of Paris, Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and beyond, embellishing them with his striking graphics and murals. He uses all forms of expression—painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video—to create a universal language through his work over the years. His trademark is an intelligent, joyful, and profound art, nourished by bright colors.

Speedy playfully and ironically challenges our systems of perception. In his approach, he does not hesitate to appropriate and subvert the imagery of popular culture, as he did in the early 2000s with superheroes and brands. In doing so, he carries out an almost systematic decoding of our collective unconscious, questioning the norms and dictates of our Western cultural identity and superimposing a more poetic dimension on the reality of our society.

When Speedy Graphito uses his personal imaginary dictionary, it is always tangibly linked to the history of art. The themes of childhood and death, which have always been prominent, give his works an often autobiographical character, inspired by his wanderings and inner journeys. All of them are an invitation to travel and to awakening. The work as a whole is that of a smuggler, marked by the dreamlike imprint of a true iconoclast.

Equally at ease in public pictorial performances and in the intimacy of his studio, Speedy Graphito devotes himself body and soul to his passion, in the urgency of passing time. He is one of those artists who has left a lasting mark on the history of art and will continue to do so.

A FEW HIGHLIGHTS:
Olivier Rizzo was only fourteen when he already felt that his path would be that of art. He studied at the École de la Rue Madame from 1975 to 1980, spending all his free time painting and, at the same time, designing and creating theater sets for five years. When he graduated from the École d’Art Estienne in Paris in 1983, he was twenty-two years old. It was during this period that he created his first stencils in the street with the group X Moulinex and began painting under the name Speedy Graphito.