Alexis "Bust" Stephens – Couples

Before he picked up a paintbrush, Alexis “Bust” Stephens was a dancer. Born in Paris in 1983 to a French mother and a Jamaican father, he first made a name for himself as a hip-hop and breakdance dancer—on stages and at jams across Europe. Drawing on this physical practice, he found his way into the vibrant Parisian street art and graffiti scene through experimentation with painting techniques, and decided early on not to keep dance and painting separate, but to fuse them into a single artistic style.His alias “Bust the Drip” dates back to this period—a fusion of the dance slang phrase “to bust a move” and the “drips,” the characteristic color gradients of his painting style. As part of the Bang Crew art collective, which brings together dancers, painters, and video, photography, and music artists, he developed extensive projects in France and internationally—until he decided to focus more on painting and to integrate dance into his work from then on as both a motif and a performance.Stephens’ artistic concept revolves around the body as the result of organized waves—“We are not made up of much, and yet everything within us pulsates.” Influenced by abstract expressionism, graffiti, and the “grande geste,” he combines painting technique and instinct in his creative process: His lively lines follow waves and frequencies, and his brushstrokes initially appear abstract and unsettling—until, as the painting progresses, his dancing protagonists emerge.In his latest series of works, “Couples,” Stephens focuses on the dance between two people: leading and being led, dominance and surrender, an exchange of emotion and tension, captured in dynamic, floating, or rotating bodies. Movement, rhythm, and physical expression come together in his work to form a gestural, pulsating visual language full of intensity and life.Stephens' works were most recently on view in a major solo exhibition at the Museum Bietigheim-Bissingen and at the Espace Saint-Pierre des Minimes, a church in Compiègne that has been converted into a museum; additional works are on display at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne.