Artist
SHAKA
Artist
Shaka focuses on portraiture and figures in movement to reveal the emotional workings behind the façade of everyday human interactions. His figures twist and turn in an energetic color palette, the movement of their bodies representing the struggle for individuality in social power politics. Heightening the internal conflicts of each figure, the paintings feature bas-relief details that pop out from the two-dimensional plane, underscoring a sense of escape and emancipation. Shaka has been practicing his unique method of sculpting on canvas since 2007 in the heart of Paris’s burgeoning contemporary art scene. Mixing technical elements and classical influences with new-age styles like tattoo design and graffiti culture, Shaka infuses his work with a pulsating menagerie of polygons, lines, and angles of radiating color. These elements reflect the inner conflicts of each of Shaka’s subjects who are searching, presumably like us, for individuality, while simultaneously living within communities organized by social norms. Most recently, in striving to conquer the greatest possibility for depth and volume, Shaka created a large-scale site-specific mural on an apartment building in Melun, France, manipulating the space to give the figures more extension. Shaka graduated with a BFA in Fine Art from the Sorbonne, where he graduated with a Masters in Multimedia Arts as well. Shaka’s work is featured in private collections in France, UK, Switzerland, Germany, Hong Kong, New York, and Los Angeles. Since he began working in early 2000, Shaka has had solo shows in the Ateliers d’Architecture des Beaux Arts in Paris, Maison Fernand Léger in CoirbeilEssone, Galerie La Place Forte and Galerie Alexandre Lazarew, Seize Galerie, and gallery nine5. He has participated in group exhibitions international, including at STATTBAD in Berlin, the Prescription Art Gallery in London, and Espace ART22 in Belgium. His solo show at gallery nine5 in 2012 was Shaka’s debut exhibit in North America.