HEKTAD!, Love Will Tear Us Apart – Opening Reception

Love Will Tear Us Apart
The celebrated New York street artist will show his newest body of work with pieces ranging from figurative sculptures to small scale, text-based canvases, to large scale paintings in spray and acrylic paint. Hektad’s new works retain his signature blended surfaces, patterned with text, that reiterate his primary artistic motivation and conceptual center: The Celebration of LOVE. The spray paint, the wild colors, and the careful placement of layered forms result in exuberant statements reiterating positivity. So it is apt that his show should launch pre-Valentine’s Day and continue through February 21, 2021, offering a feast for the eyes of lovers who come in person to view the exhibition at 23 Warren Street, as well as for the members of our online community.

Hektad grew up during the storied era of the emergence of graffiti art. From its earliest expressions, the culture of graffiti art has sparked competitive infamy amongst young artists inspired to make their mark on their stomping grounds. The street artists of New York City identified strongly with the city’s rich culture, coming from a deep sense of belonging and a recognition of the significance of belonging and of home.

During the 1980s, New York graffiti artists’ reputations grew through tagging subway cars, which exposed their work to audiences far beyond the pieces they painted in their own neighborhoods. When city law enforcement curbed the tagging of trains, artists returned to the walls with more zeal and inspiration.

Locations for graffiti art were lost as old industrial spaces were demolished due to city planning changes and gentrification, but in recent city development trends, this negation has declined. Developers have begun to recognize the value of street art: Graffiti and tagging have been absorbed into the mainstream aesthetic. Public artworks are celebrated and commissioned; murals serve to recognize and validate this important subculture and an artistic genre.

Hektad was raised in the Bronx. The moniker, Hektad manifests as a merging of the tag HEK and the acronym TAD for ‘They always Destroy’ which was the name of Hektad’s first teenage crew, established in 1984. Hektad remembers the early days when the young, self-taught artists dropped works across the city and nobody seemed to care and certainly nobody seemed to value their work. It is estimated that he contributed to hundreds of graffiti works from 1981 when he was 12 years old, until 1999 when he left the scene for 15 years. Hektad returned from his hiatus in 2014. Since then his output has been prolific and his profile, reputation, and recognition have soared.