East London street artist Stik has complained of “commercial exploitation” after a community mural he painted in Poland was discovered in pieces and on sale for £10,000 at a West London gallery.
Stik and a group of local children from Gdansk in Poland painted the Children’s Community Mural on a shipping container in 2011.
The public art work went missing from the Polish city in 2014, only to resurface at Lamberty Gallery in Belgravia, where individual pieces of the now dissected mural were found on sale for £10,000.
“I want to see them returned to the community who helped paint them,” Stik told the East End Review.
“My intention was to give a gift to that local area and that is what I agreed with the gallery who commissioned the mural. We agreed it was for educational purposes only and I would like them to remain what they were contracted to be.”
Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, the Polish gallery that commissioned the 2011 mural, has confirmed it went missing “in circumstances unknown” and that Polish authorities are investigating the disappearance.
Andrew Lamberty, director of Lamberty Gallery, did not respond to a request for comment, but has released a statement attempting to “put the record straight”, stressing that the work was purchased legally.
“Lamberty purchased these containers from a recreation ground beside a canal after viewing them in autumn 2014,” the statement reads.
“We commissioned a Polish agent to find and pay the owners and beneficiaries, who we understand were the Canoe club and the Director of the local school.
“We have recently been contacted by an arts institution called Laznia that was involved with Stik to create the project in 2011. Laznia did not notice that the containers had been removed until Stik contacted them a year later.
“Lamberty legally purchased these works with full documentation. We removed them from a harsh outdoor climate and prepared them for indoor instalment.”
Talking to the East End Review, Stik was tight-lipped over what he could disclose about the case, which is now in the hands of lawyers.
He did reveal, however, that a dialogue has opened between the two galleries.
“I am assisting them but as it stands Lamberty has the pieces and has given no indication that he’s going to return them but we are optimistic,” Stik said, adding that he will not authenticate remains of the art work.
Stik describes himself as “duty bound” to help the people of Gdansk retrieve their mural.
“Local residents have written to me asking what’s happening and I have promised them I will get it back for them,” Stik said.
“I feel a good sense of solidarity with that community. Really this piece has not been stolen from me – it’s not about me – it’s about that community and the artwork that the young people created in 2011.”
I make it to Foyles at 6.30pm on the dot to find a queue spilling from an excited throng in the auditorium. The line runs down the stairs and out into the cafe, where a second – non-priority – queue begins. “It’s the busiest book signing I can remember,” a flustered employee tells me.
The heaving crowds have turned out in force to pick up a copy of street artist Stik’s eponymously-titled new book and get it signed by the mysterious man himself – who, perched on a raised platform, is donning a paint-spattered shirt, dark shades and a black leather cap.
His heavy, rose-coloured publication documents a curiously affecting, politically-motivated body of work that relies primarily on basic stick figures. It’s a portfolio, so to speak, that first started to appear on Hackney’s walls more than a decade ago and has since spread across the globe.
A few days later, we chat on the phone and he’s as genial as he was with fans earlier in the week. “It was incredible”, he says of the event. “I was only supposed to be doing an hour, but in the end I stayed there for about three.”
A Child Watching Over a Sleeping Parent by Stik
Softly spoken and oozing enthusiasm, Stik is keen to talk about his connection with this publication’s sister title, the Hackney Citizen. Roughly half a decade ago, whilst living in St Mungo’s Hostel on Mare Street, he began a fruitful collaboration with the paper, which, he explains, gave him a structure that would eventually lead to his first book.
“I’d speak to the editors and we’d pick a local news story. I would find a specific place relevant to that story, do a mural and then I’d write a brief column explaining why that painting was there and what news issue it was relating to,” he says.
“Doing that monthly piece really made me think about street art on a much deeper level and what sort of impact I could have on the community – how I could represent my community through art. So that was the catalyst for the book.”
The original publications make for an interesting stand-alone project. The first he sends across to me includes an image of Pole Dancer, a 2010 piece scrawled outside a strip club in Great Eastern Street. The work portrays one of his signature black-and-white stick people swinging, eyes closed,
around a pole.
“That was in reference to Hackney Council’s move to clamp down on what they deemed indecent sex clubs,” he says. “They cut out a lot of the healthy, consenting adult subculture in Hackney under the guise of trying to curb sex trafficking… So, yeah, I did that piece to sort of celebrate the kink culture and just draw reference to what
was happening.”
Pole Dancer by Stik, published in the Hackney Citizen (November, 2010)
Other examples of Stik’s work that were produced during that time include Lovers, Waiting Room and Children of Fire; these were done in response to the council’s eviction of a Dalston Lane ‘queer squat’, cuts to the NHS, and the “civil unrest… triggered by the police killing of Mark Duggan”, respectively. He goes on to explain that, as well as conveying a wider social message, each mural contains a narrative personal to him.
Of Lovers, which shows two androgynous figures embracing against a red background, he says: “The squat was a safe house for people from oppressive regimes, for queer and transgender people who were not safe in their home towns or home countries… There was no real service like it within the mainstream infrastructure – this was something that was lacking.
“But it was also a place which I had a personal connection with. I belonged to that community, you know, that’s me in the painting. A lot of it is my story – it’s my experience of being marginalised, of being oppressed and how that relates to society at large.”
Climate Change, by Stik
It’s interesting that Stik describes his work as a means of telling his own story. Outside of his art, biographical details are sketchy. His email moniker is simply Stik Person and he stresses a set of “strict rules” when it comes to answering questions about his past – it’s not even known where he originates from.
He does, however, talk relatively freely about his time in Hackney, which, going by artistic evidence, began sometime around 2003. He explains that when he first arrived he spent time squatting in London Fields Lido, during the period leading up to its renovation and reopening in the mid-2000s.
“I used to live in the changing rooms there,” he says. “I slept in an art shipping case that I’d salvaged from Momart, the art shipping company. It was a plywood packing case that according to its label once contained a Kandinsky and was destined for, I think, Claudia Schiffer, somewhere in Hollywood.”
At this point, I’m not sure if he’s pulling my leg, but he goes on to describe what sounds like a dark, difficult and deeply informative period of his life.
“I was homeless for many years and I was very cold and hungry for a long time,” he says, “but I would always find abandoned buildings. I didn’t have any reason to sleep in doorways in Mare Street because I always managed to somehow get through the door.”
A Couple Hold Hands in the Street, by Stik. Photograph: Claude Crommelin
He refers back to the Pole Dancer piece: “It’s very personal to me. When you’re homeless you find all sorts of ways of making a living and I’ve had to make ends meet through all sorts of things. That’s why I identify with the struggle of sex workers in Hackney and the stigmatisation that they’ve had put on them.”
The more he talks, the more enigmatic and fascinating he becomes; the more complicated his work is. He describes with zeal his many experiences painting abroad – the highlight, for me, being a set of wind turbines he worked on in Norway – and what the future holds now the world is interested.
“I feel very warmly embraced by the communities that I have worked with,” he says. “I feel very grateful as an artist for that experience. It’s an exciting journey – it’s a huge responsibility, but I do feel that it’s my responsibility as an artist to respond to the current political state of affairs.”
Stik’s book, which forms one mammoth project, is a triumph. His pared-down, sublimely minimal approach delivers touching snippets of human experience and explores private city space in a dramatically public manner. He’s both engaged and engaging; it’s easy to understand his fast-rising popularity in the art scene.
As we tie up our conversation, Stik makes an obscure reference to Somerset, and when I ask more he shrugs it off and mutters something about friends and some work he’s got going on there.
I can’t help but feel it’s a hint at a previous life; another scrap of the obscure biography he’s been scribbling on walls everywhere. I can’t be sure, but it’s fun to speculate.
Stik is published by Century. RRP: £20. ISBN: 9781780893334
Stik’s Print Launch is on 24 September from 5-8pm at the Education Centre, Homerton University Hospital, Homerton Row, E9 6SR
Detail from RUN’s latest piece of street art in Lower Clapton
To be ubiquitous on the streets yet elusive in person are two of the unwritten rules of street art.
And Italian artist RUN ticks both boxes, his trademark hands and interlocking faces adorning walls everywhere from Shoreditch to the backstreets of Lower Clapton – yet he is known only by a pseudonym.
A third rule – to have a socially engaged or political message – is something RUN never used to concern himself with.
“The political statement is implicit in the act of painting on the street,” says the street artist.
But a commission to re-do a painting in Clapton Passage, on the side wall of what is now a veterinary practice, changed things for the artist.
RUN set out to paint some animals or something related to the natural world in the small passageway off Lower Clapton Road where his work has been visible for several years.
After making a start he returned five or six times, adding something new to the artwork each time.
Two days after the recent election, RUN was on his ladder finishing the piece off, when a member of the public seeing the artwork called up to him, shouting: “Ah-ha! It’s a banker! A banker on a lead!”
RUN describes the finished piece as a man with a chain around his neck “looking like a raging animal under anaesthetic and crawling like all the animals of the forest and the savanna.”
Airing political views in a public setting is breaking new ground for RUN, but instead of a feeling of release, the experience has brought with it some unfamiliar anxieties.
“The message is not very hidden. It is pretty clear and obvious. But what is not obvious is the fear I have that the piece will be censored or deleted after someone complains,” RUN says.
“This of course happens all the time and is not a big deal. But after this election I feel all the social places and artistic spaces that are made by people and not by associations or corporate brands will be soon taken away.”
There is no evidence to suggest the new government will crack down on street art. Graffiti removal is, after all, the responsibility of councils rather than central government.
But could a surprise by-product of the election be a flourishing of political art? For street artist RUN the writing – or the paint at least – is on the wall.
