ARTMUC

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.

The artist, born in Ireland in 1967, has carved out his own place in urban art with a visual language that deliberately sets aside the conventions of street art. His work combines elements of contemporary art with the aesthetics of the street. He calls this approach “Urban Aesthetics.”Based in London today, Fin DAC is self-taught. Without access to galleries or museums, he found no way into the art world for a long time and first worked as a technical draughtsman, graphic designer and web developer. He was around forty when he first picked up a paintbrush. Painting female portraits became a meditative practice for him, a way to quieten the constant “negative chatter” of the mind. His influences range from Japanese woodblock prints, manga and graphic novels to Aubrey Beardsley, whose print left its mark on him as a child.Women Between WorldsHis figures move between tradition and the present: traditional dress and symbolism meet a modern sensibility. Pride and dignity run through the portraits, balanced by a playful streak that questions stereotypes. A defining feature is the painted mask worn by many of his female figures. Its design draws on Pris from Blade Runner and on the androgynous stage persona of Annie Lennox. The twin drips falling from the mask remain deliberately enigmatic. The small dot at the level of the third eye represents the artist himself.Murals in Cities Around the WorldHis training as a technical draughtsman, in which he learned layout, perspective and scale, forms the basis of his large-scale murals. Over the past decade he has transformed grey urban spaces across the world into vivid visual worlds. One of his most personal projects is A Quiet Moment of Contemplation (2020), a mural for the women’s ward of the psychiatric intensive care unit at the St Charles Centre for Health and Wellbeing in London. The work reflects his belief in the healing power of art.Exhibitions, Fairs and EditionsHis collaboration with Pretty Portal began in 2012 with the exhibition STENCILS ONLY 2012. Since then, nine limited screen-print editions have been produced together with Fin DAC and published by Pretty Portal.In 2017, Pretty Portal presented his work on its own stand at the Urvanity Art Fair in Madrid and at the Urban Art Fair in Paris. The Urban Art Fair in Paris followed in 2018, and the ARTMUC in Munich in 2026.In 2022 he took part in the group exhibition Mixed Reality, and in 2023 in Looks are deceiving.In 2024 he presented HomEage (Split Personalities), a tribute to the artists, movements and cultural moments that shaped his path. In 2025 came Carte Blanche in Paris, an engagement with Japonisme that brings 19th-century Japanese woodblock prints together with the Belle Époque and Fin de Siècle. With The Girls of Dactown (The GoDs)he extends his world of figures into three dimensions: a dystopian universe of cyborg assassins that now exists as life-size bronze sculptures and vinyl figures.“I create art to keep myself happy.” – Fin DAC

Guy Denning was born in North Somerset in 1965. Even as a child, he was obsessed with the visual arts, and at the age of eleven he painted his first oil paintings, inspired by old, dusty paintings that a relative had given him. In the 1980s, his applications to study fine arts were rejected, but this did not deter him from pursuing his passion. He studied art history, continued to paint, and learned painting techniques from various older artists in the West of England. In 1992, he exhibited throughout the United Kingdom, followed in 2007 by exhibitions in the United States, Germany, Italy, and France. His works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions and are part of various public collections, including those of the Department of Political Science at the University of Bristol, the Department of Political Science at the University of Galway, and the MAGI’900 Museum of Contemporary Art in Bologna.Denning's works combine a traditional painting style with contemporary, punk-inspired text incorporated as collages and stencils. His visual language and aesthetic, blended with the political narrative that runs through his work, have earned Denning a loyal following among art collectors and urban art enthusiasts.„Urban art is not a new phenomenon. People have been declaring their presence, their humour, their fears and their anger in the streets for as long as there have been streets for it to be seen in. It’s the most democratic form of art; it’s a medium that is available to any that feel the need to use it. With the acceptance and celebration of graffiti culture in the twentieth century it has come to a point where it is now sited behind the streets, in fashionable galleries. Yes, fashions change, but don’t ever think that the graffiti will fade away. That particular writing has always been on the wall.“ – Guy Denning

Faces without a gaze, bodies caught in a grid of cool geometry: SKIO paints the anonymity of the modern city with surgical precision. In his compositions, fragmented figures merge with stylized, often rigorously constructed architecture — a subtle dialogue between emotionally charged figuration and cool abstraction. Where the eyes should sit as mirrors of the soul, he deliberately leaves a void: it invites projection and makes the anonymity of modern urban life immediately tangible.His paintings reflect a present in which the self increasingly dissolves into the system — the uniformity our society imposes on the individual, as well as the beauty ideals that women in particular can barely escape. Some of his figures appear to wear VR headsets — a nod to a world in which reality and virtual reality have long since merged. Remarkably, although every image is painted entirely by hand, the aesthetic often recalls AI-generated imagery — an ambiguity SKIO plays with quite deliberately.Stylistically, SKIO combines the spirit of Bauhaus with Surrealism: he seeks a balance between complexity and minimalism, between softness and structure, lending his portraits an almost sculptural quality. His exhibition "Mensch & Form" (Human & Form) at Pretty Portal was, to date, the most consistent distillation of this visual language — a quiet, poetic examination of what it means to be human today, caught between withdrawal and visibility, structure and fragility.SKIO, born Nicolas Scauri, was born in 1980 in Nice and now lives in Paris. He studied graphic design in Manchester and industrial design at the Institut Européen de Design in Toulon. He painted his first murals in 1993 in the Nice region; after a phase of experimenting with typography andgraffiti, he found his way — via influences from pop and television culture — to his present figurative-architectural visual language. His work has been shown at exhibitions and festivals in Paris, London, Mexico City and Shanghai; in recent years, SKIO has increasingly come into focus among international urban art collectors.