THE PRETTY WALL SHOW

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.

What if, with our machines, we are only poorly copying what nature perfected long ago? French artist ARDIF (Paris) places precisely this question at the heart of his work. His "Mechanimals" – animals whose bodies are half naturalistic, half transformed into intricate mechanical architecture – juxtapose fauna and machine with such precision that a visual short circuit occurs: where does the original end and the copy begin? The juxtaposition creates a subtle tension that invites close looking. ARDIF's underlying thesis: engineers and designers have always borrowed their best ideas from nature – yet they only ever produce limited replicas that never match the precision, complexity and efficiency of the originals. Nature remains the source of ideas; humankind, a mere plagiarist. From this observation, ARDIF has developed a visual vocabulary that conveys both admiration for technology and concern about its consequences – the threat human progress poses to nature, the fragile balance between innovation and respect for the environment. His creations often appear dystopian – creatures like relics of a failed future. Yet his borrowings from historic architecture and steampunk aesthetics lighten this heaviness and shift the tone towards the nostalgic and romantic: rivets instead of microchips, brass instead of plastic, cogwheels instead of circuit boards. This love of visible, almost affectionately overcomplicated mechanics links ARDIF to Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, whose kinetic scrap-metal machines inspired him to build his own playful yet morbid mechanical world. Before turning to art, ARDIF studied mathematics, dropped out, and found his way to architecture via a foundation year in art – training that still lends his visual language technical precision and a constructive sense of space. After graduating, he and the collective Concrete Balloons initiated projects in abandoned industrial sites and derelict factories, including the immersive exhibition "Imachinarium". Since around 2016, his half-mechanical animals have appeared as large-scale paste-ups across Paris and can now be found in numerous European cities – ARDIF has also left his mark on Düsseldorf with a series of interventions in public space. While ARDIF long focused primarily on compositions drawn from the animal kingdom, flora has now entered his work as well: new drawings, illustrations and installations expand his mechanical-organic universe to include plants – a logical continuation, rendered with the same fine line and the same conceptual rigour.

L.E.T. calls himself “Les Enfants Terribles”—yet this French artist has long been considered one of the pioneers of the German street art scene. He has been active on the streets since 1992 and has helped shape the visual landscape of several cities with his work, most notably his adopted home of Düsseldorf. He first sprays his designs onto paper and then displays them as “cutouts” in urban spaces—high-contrast black-and-white figures that he deliberately breaks up with splashes of color.L.E.T.’s artistic approach can be described as a constant process of referencing, deconstructing, and reassembling the familiar. With a touch of irony, he takes aim at contemporary issues and engages in a dialogue with our consumerist and pleasure-seeking society. His installation “How Is This Happening!?” demonstrated that he is also capable of striking a more serious note: He had body bags sewn from life jackets belonging to refugees that he had collected on Lesbos—a poignant image of the transformation of hope into grief at the gates of “Fortress Europe.”His consistent artistic career—shaped by urban art conventions around the world—also led L.E.T. into the gallery: For these works, he switches to gallery-appropriate media such as canvas, cardboard, and wood, without diluting his unmistakable style. The Urban Art Museum Munich (MUCA) dedicated an entire room to him; he was part of Urban Nation in Berlin; and with “No Walls for Old Men,” he presented his first solo show at Pretty Portal in Düsseldorf—a title that should be understood less literally and more as a statement of intent: As one of Germany’s longest-serving stencil artists, L.E.T. truly has nothing to fear from walls.

Roman Klonek's family came to West Germany from the Polish part of Upper Silesia in the 1970s; he himself grew up in Hanover. From 1993 to 1999 he studied Visual Communication with a focus on printmaking at the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences, complemented by a scholarship for woodcut printing at the Trier Academy of Fine Arts. While still a student, he co-founded the artist group "Tapezisten" and the graphic fanzine "Herrensahne" together with Tobi Dahmen and Leo Leowald.Klonek is today one of the internationally recognized figures of contemporary printmaking in Germany. His works are multi-colored woodcuts, printed using the "reduction print" method: the printing block is cut further after each color and can only ever be used once — which is why each edition is limited to just a handful of prints, usually no more than ten. Around twenty new motifs are created this way each year, every one printed by hand.In his pictorial worlds, whimsical creatures and human-animal metamorphoses meet in a pop- surreal, often absurd-seeming setting.Typographic elements drawn from Cyrillic and Asian characters set striking accents. Klonek pulls off a deft balancing act between propaganda aesthetics, folklore and pop — fed by Polish, Russian and Czech animated films of the 1970s as much as by role models such as Frank Kozik, Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami, Raymond Pettibon, Gary Baseman and Zdeněk Miler.From 2001 to 2008, Klonek co-organized the Düsseldorf "Galerie Revolver"; he has also appeared several times at the character design festival "Pictoplasma" and regularly teaches woodcut workshops at graphic arts colleges. His commissioned drawings have appeared in WIRED, the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. His work is exhibited in Germany and increasingly internationally, most recently in Oslo, London and São Paulo. Roman Klonek lives and works in Düsseldorf.