José Parlá Art for Sale: Prints & Originals

One of the most exciting artists working today, José Parla is best known for his graffiti-inspired abstract expressionist aesthetic. Parlá’s work references key moments in Contemporary art history, from Abstract Expressionism to graffiti and even calligraphy.

Parlá’s career began at just 10 years old, when he started painting walls in his hometown. Influenced by the burgeoning hip-hop scene of the day, Parlá would sign his artworks with the tag ‘Ease’. In 1986, Parlá and a few fellow graffiti writers founded the graffiti crews IKOA – or ‘International Kings of Art’ – and VIP – or ‘Vandals in Power’.

At 16, Parlá received a prominent scholarship to study at the Savannah College of Art & Design. Upon completion of his first degree in art, Parlá returned to Miami where he continued to study advanced painting at the New World School of the Arts and studied under Mel Alexenberg – a prominent American-Israeli artist known for his experimentations with technology and so-called ‘participatory’ art.

Parlá began to exhibit prints and paintings in various solo exhibitions in Atlanta while he was still a student. However, his first major solo show didn’t take place until 2006, when he exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach.

At the time, Parlá’s works were characterised by their experimentation with tactile media, like clay and ceramics, where he would inscribe complex and eminently calligraphic graffiti tags. These palimpsestic works were part of the artist’s wider interest in both the texture of cities and the so-called ‘urban fabric’: tangible themes he continues to grapple with today.

Throughout the remainder of the 2000s, there was a shift in Parlá’s art from small-scale paintings imbued with movement and lyricism, to works that depicted the surfaces of the city and the memories with which they are inscribed. 2012 saw Parlá complete his beloved large-scale painting, Gesture Performing Dance. Measuring 37 feet long by 7 feet, the work adorns the side of The Brooklyn Academy Of Music in the artist’s adoptive home of New York.

Later that year, Parlá had his breakthrough moment when he collaborated with notable French street artist, photographer and documentary filmmaker JR on Wrinkles Of The City: Havana. The pair worked on the multi-form piece as part of the Havana Biennale, photographing around 25 older Cubans who had lived through the country’s revolution in 1953-1959 and pasting their profiles onto a number of buildings in the city; Parlá’s signature calligraphy accompanied the portraits, ascribing a dream-like texture to the city’s dilapidated urban surfaces.

In 2013, Parlá was invited to make an artwork for the lobby of One World Trade Center in New York City.

Despite his formal artistic training, Parlá continues to cite the ‘do it yourself’ ethos of hip-hop culture, as well as the movement’s inherently social relationship to both people and the built environment as an enduring influence on his experimental creative process.
Beyond the world of graffiti, Parlá’s work owes debt to the semi-abstract paintings of Gerhard Richter, the abstract expressionist work of Jackson Pollock and the multi-layered, palimpsestic paintings produced by pioneering American artist Cy Twombly during the 1950s. Some have likened his murals to abstracted versions of those produced by Mexican painter Diego Rivera.
In addition to his illustrious career as a visual artist, Parlá has dabbled in the world of documentary filmmaking. For the Wrinkles Of The City: Havana project, Parlá collaboration with secretive French artist JR saw the pair co-direct a documentary film of the same name. A portrait of the Cuban capital – in both senses of the word – the film examined the process behind the artistic duo’s artistic project, probing the relationship between art, the built environment, and personal and collective history in the process. Wrinkles Of The City: Havana was awarded the Grand Prize for Best Documentary Short and the Best U.S. Premiere Documentary Short at the 2013 Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis, USA.