MARFA Invitational Texas 2023
"The Walkabout"
UFO907
May 4th - 7th 2023
For this year’s Marfa Invitational, Lorin Gallery has the special honor of bringing to the Chihuahuan desert highland a new series by UFO907, one of the most prominent figures in contemporary street arts and graffiti. Lorin Gallery’s presentation explores the artist’s legendary career through a new body of surrealistic paintings that straddle the line between tall tale and actual lived experience painted on handcrafted shaped canvas.
Compounding his own detoured but faithful pilgrimage to arts with the avant-garde initiative of Marfa, this new series has transcended UFO907’s previous mono-characterization and has witnessed a significant increase in the scene’s narrative depth with dreamlike configuration. With frequent reference to his blue-collar materials, uncanonical art form and cultural upbringings from the 90s, UFO907 looks retrospectively at an artist’s Sisyphus combat with time, at the humanitarian desire of remember, of permanence, of wanting to leave a mark.
This piece, “The Walkabout” is the thematically centrale in the new series. Assembling emblematic elements retrieved from his previous years of graffiti writing, UFO907 created this auto-biographical work as a milestone to reflect on his tumultuous journey. The paint, pole, and brush are a reference to his formative years as a street art artist, out of which emerges his distinguishable visual language with the expressiveness of graffiti character and the subtlety of classical composition. Many of the symbolic characters from UFO907’s previous oeuvre have had their reappearance in the new painting. The central anthropomorphic figure is UFO907’s self-portrait, and through the reflection in his glasses, there rises from the horizon the geographical landscape of Chihuahuan desert