Michal Škapa

Bio

Michal Škapa (*1978) is one of the most distinctive artists associated with the Czech graffiti scene, a member and leading figure of the strong generation of graffiti writers that emerged onto the scene in the mid-1990s. The quality of his work is further confirmed by the fact that he managed to establish himself in the gallery world. In his fine art, he works with a number of different media and formats, including murals, acrylic abstract paintings, figurative airbrush compositions, and site-specific installations and objects. He is also a graphic designer, a co-founder of the Analog!Bros screen-printing workshop, and a close collaborator of the BiggBoss publishing house. His works have been exhibited at numerous important shows in his field, including the still-legendary international survey of graffiti and street art Names (2008) and Stuck on the City (2012) at Prague City Gallery. He also represented the Czech Republic at Expo 2010 in Shanghai. Important solo exhibitions include 00 Nothing at Trafo Gallery (2011), From One Wall to Another at GAVU Cheb (2012), and the groundbreaking Graffoman at Prague’s Chemistry Gallery (2014). This last show inspired his successful 2017 exhibition Analfabet at Trafo Gallery, which included his first large catalogue. In 2018, he not only participated in the Signal festival with the outdoor neon installation Revelation, but also and above all spent the year putting together his largest solo exhibition to date, Babylon at Villa Pellé. In 2019, he created a fifteen-meter-tall neon sculpture for the DEPO2015 building in Pilsen as part of the Blik Blik festival of lights, which included an exhibition inside the building. Škapa spent 2020 working on a number of different neon projects, including one in Brno’s Vlněna building and another on the facade of the new Telegraph Gallery in Olomouc. Also that year, he returned to creating outdoor works and painted a series of large-format murals. After the practice run at Brno’s Vlněna and a sound barrier in Prague-Veleslavín, he launched into his largest project ever, covering a 350-meter-long wall immediately adjoining one of the runways at Václav Havel Airport with his original art. The mural, titled Kosmos, thus welcomes visitors to Prague from a distance. Škapa also decorated a new community center in the city’s Prosek neighborhood. Another recent undertaking was the exhibition Polis at the Bethlehem Chapel Gallery, where he showed a set of his urban compositions.