
Artist: Martin Whatson
Title: Make Peace
Medium: 25 Color Screen Print
Size: 70 x 70 cm
Edition: 250
Price: £495

*there is also a black, hand embellished, acrylic and brass variant available
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Martin Whatson is a Norwegian painter, printmaker and muralist born in Oslo in 1984 who has forged a signature dialogue between order and chaos. While studying graphic design at Westerdals School of Communication he discovered stencil art through the early 2000s wave of European street art, but unlike many peers he refused to abandon his graffiti roots. His breakthrough aesthetic pairs meticulous monochrome stencils of figures, cityscapes or endangered animals with explosive streaks of neon tags, drips and calligraphic flourishes that he paints freehand straight over the crisp imagery. The result feels like a frozen tug-of-war: the clean up crew versus the writer, the gallery versus the wall, captured in one glossy moment.
Working without projections, Whatson cuts intricate multi-layer stencils by hand, sprays them in desaturated greys, then attacks the surface with buckets of candy pink, cyan and yellow, letting paint run, drip and overlap until the original image peers through a storm of colour. Murals in Wynwood, Stavanger, Shoreditch and lower Manhattan carry this conversation to public space, while studio canvases and editioned prints on aluminium bring the same energy indoors. Recent series insert children pulling back curtains to reveal tagged walls or power wash workers mid spray, turning the eternal cat-and-mouse of street art into gentle visual theatre.
Exhibitions at Harman Projects New York, Vertical Gallery Chicago and Nuart Festival have sold out rapidly, and his 2023 publication InsideOutsider traces the evolution from teenage subway tagger to internationally collected fine artist. Whether painting a ten storey endangered sea turtle in Miami or a handfinished screen print in his Oslo studio, Whatson keeps the process quick and instinctive, a nod to the cold, dark Nordic nights that taught him to work fast and bold.