Diva (red)
Signed Print

This print’s title hints at the concern with gender that is omnipresent in the artist’s work. Stik’s answer to questions regarding the gender of his figures is straightforward: “They are androgynous. They are what you decide they are and they can transcend gender”

The artist’s ability to use line sparingly to convey the unique shapes of the human body is used to full effect here as the figure radiates trepidation and reluctance. In the preface to Stik’s 2016, Anthony Haden-Guest writes that  ‘they can bring Keith Haring to mind, or a mainstream Modernist like Léger, but actually he is channelling way earlier sources, like the figures cut into the white chalk hills in England’s West Country or the Naza Lines in Peru’. Stik’s  barebone use of line defies analogy with his contemporaries, tapping into a time-honoured tradition of line drawing as a record of human presence articulating that “we are still here.”