Nick Walker nikers

[1] is an established graffiti artist originating from Bristol, England. He is credited with being part of the stencil graffiti movement that Robert Del Naja had started in the 1980s, which was also an influence on Banksy. Walker was invited by film director Stanley Kubrick to recreate the graffiti’d streets of New York for his 1999 film, Eyes Wide Shut.^[2]

His paintings often feature a bowler-hatted gentleman ‘vandal’, which featured in a video by The Black Eyed Peas.^[2]

Walker’s paintings now sell for large sums of money – in 2006 a spray painted work titled “Moona Lisa” sold for an unexpected £54,000 at Bonhams in London.^[3] At a solo exhibition at London’s Black Rat Gallery in 2008, £750,000 worth of art was sold, with dozens of people camping outside the gallery overnight.^[3]

Walker was a main participant in the 2011 See No Evil event in Bristol, where he painted “perhaps the most striking piece at the event”,^[4] one of his bowler-hatted gentleman on the side of a tower block in Nelson Street.

Nick Walker was the very first artist-in-residence of the Quin Arts program at the Quin hotel in New York City. Walker created 15 original pieces on-site for the Quin’s permanent collection during his residency in 2013, shortly following the hotel’s opening.^[5] In 2016, Nick Walker revisited the Quin to showcase both historic images, as well as a new vocabulary of abstraction. This solo exhibit, curated by DK Johnston, presented 25 original works and opened the hotel’s Quin Arts program for the 2016 season.^[6]

Walker still lives in Bristol.^[7]