MIKE GIANT

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(1971, New York, US)

Acclaimed worldwide for his prolific work in graffiti, illustration, design and tattoo, Mike Giant is one of the most complete artists of his generation.

As a child he moved to Albu­querque, New Mex­ico, where he stud­ied archi­tec­ture and later he landed in San Fran­cisco, where he was offered a job as a graphic draw­ing artist at Think Skate­boards. Even when he was very young, he worked as a writer in the world of graf­fiti and skate sub­cul­ture, becom­ing at the end of the nineties a tat­too artist, motor­cy­cle and bike cus­tomizer and, lastly, cre­ative mind of the lifestyle brand REBEL8. 

Mike Giant, who defines him­self as an “old hip­ster”, is known inter­na­tion­ally for the extreme pre­ci­sion and rig­or­ous black and white of his lines, that is affected by the influ­ence of pop­u­lar Mex­i­can art and Japan­ese illus­tra­tion. In his pro­duc­tion, that mixes styles and sym­bols of dif­fer­ent nature, we see a con­ver­gence of reli­gious iconog­ra­phy and death alle­gories, tribal sym­bol­ogy and Bud­dhist doc­trine, let­ter­ing and old school ele­ments, in a con­tin­u­ous inter­sect­ing of sacred and pro­fane, love and death. Seduc­tive pin ups and wink­ing femme fatales, BMX bikes, skulls, snakes and Cal­i­forn­ian urban visions pop­u­late his work, all made with extreme care, regard­less of the sup­port, whether it’s leather, paper, metal or cement. His draw­ings and mul­ti­ples have been shown in numer­ous spaces and gal­leries all over the world, from WDWA Gallery in New York to Mis­an­thropy Gallery in Van­cou­ver, to Magda Danysz Gallery in Paris to Mon­ster Chil­dren Gallery in Aus­tralia. Fur­ther­more, his works have often been used by lifestyle and cloth­ing brands, among which the bike com­pany Cinelli and the brands Tribal Gear and Upper Playground.

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