SEEN

Richard Mirando, known as SEEN, was born in the Bronx on 17 October 1961 and began painting the New York subway in the mid-1970s. Working principally the 2, 5 and 6 lines, he produced whole cars in numbers and at a consistency that made him one of the most visible writers of the era, and the images photographed by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant for Subway Art in 1984 fixed several of his pieces as the definitive documents of the period. He appeared prominently in the 1983 documentary Style Wars.

His lettering is heavy, rounded and emphatically legible, built for reading at speed across the length of a car, and it became a foundation on which a generation of writers built. Alongside the letters he painted characters drawn from cartoons and comics — Smurfs, Bugs Bunny, the Hanna-Barbera repertoire — treated without irony, and that combination of monumental lettering and borrowed cartoon figures has remained his signature on canvas.

The studio work extends rather than translates the practice. He paints in aerosol on canvas and on found and salvaged material — steel, panelling, objects taken off the street — and has made sculpture from the same sources. The surfaces are worked hard, and the accumulation of overspray, drips and layered marks preserves the conditions of the yards in which the vocabulary was formed.

SEEN was in New York/New Wave at P.S.1 in 1981 and exhibited with the Yaki Kornblit Gallery in Amsterdam from 1982, one of the earliest writers to be handled by a European dealer. His work entered museum exhibitions almost immediately: Graffiti at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 1983, New York Graffiti at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 1984, the Becht Collection at the Stedelijk Museum the same year, and later the Groninger Museum, the Musée National des Monuments Français, the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, the Grand Palais and The Andy Warhol Museum.

He is widely referred to as the Godfather of Graffiti, a title that reflects both his output and the extent to which his letterforms were copied. In 1985 he wrote his name across the Hollywood sign. He has continued to exhibit internationally, notably a long run of solo exhibitions with Opera Gallery across Paris, London, Geneva, Hong Kong and Dubai between 2011 and 2014.

SELECTED CV

Born 17 October 1961, New York, NY, USA

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2014 SEEN — Superheroes, Opera Gallery, London, United Kingdom

2014 Post No Bills, Opera Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

2013 SEEN — Superheros, Opera Gallery, Paris, France

2013 Post No Bills, Opera Gallery, Hong Kong

2013 SEEN, Opera Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland

2011 SEEN Retrospective, Opera Gallery, Paris, France

2010 PleaSE-ENjoy, Magda Danysz Gallery, Paris, France

2009 SEEN — Pop Up Show, Lyon, France

2007 SEEN City: Make Your Mark, Galerie Chappe, Paris, France

2007 Sign of the Times, StolenSpace Gallery, London, United Kingdom

2005 End of an Era, The Outside Institute, London, United Kingdom

2005 Vintage Monsters, McCaig-Welles Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2005 Stencil This, Prosper Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

2003 What Makes a Subway Car Run?, STIP Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands

1985 SEEN, Yaki Kornblit Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands

1985 SEEN: Exhibition and Live Demonstration, Suntory Company, Tokyo, Japan

1984 SEEN, Stellweg-Seguy Gallery, New York, NY, USA

1983 SEEN, Yaki Kornblit Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Selected Group Exhibitions

2023 Un-Leashed: Tagging the Past — Post Graffiti in the 80s, Ghost Galerie, Paris, France

2019 We Were Here, Chase Contemporary, New York, NY, USA

2019 Street Cred, Tinney Contemporary, Nashville, TN, USA

2018 Unsanctioned: Voices Off the Wall, Opera Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland

2017 Saint Tropez Show 2017 Is Back, David Pluskwa Art Contemporain, Marseille, France

2016 Saint Tropez Art Show, David Pluskwa Art Contemporain, Marseille, France

2014 Poppy Graffiti, Opera Gallery, Seoul, South Korea

2013 Street Art in the City, ProArt Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

2012 The Street Art Show, Opera Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

2012 Graff the Peace, Opera Gallery, Paris, France

2012 Legends of the Streets, Light Box Gallery, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

2011 Graff City, Opera Gallery, Paris, France

Museum and Institutional Exhibitions

2010 Playboy Redux, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

2010 Richard “SEEN” Mirando (solo), La Fondazione Valenzi, Castel Nuovo, Naples, Italy

2009 Né dans la rue — Graffiti, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, France

2009 Le TAG au Grand Palais, Grand Palais, Paris, France

1998 New York Graffiti Art: Coming from the Subways — The Collection of Henk and Leonie Pijnenburg, Museum der Stadt Ratingen, Ratingen, Germany

1995 Art of the 80s and 90s, Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands

1992 Coming from the Subways, Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands

1991 Graffiti Art, Musée National des Monuments Français, Paris, France

1991 Post Graffiti — Fine Art, Federal Reserve Board, Washington, DC, USA

1989 Graffiti Between Anarchy and Gallery, Helmond Museum, Helmond, Netherlands, and Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg, Germany

1985 New York Graffiti, Museum Helmond, Helmond, Netherlands

1984 The Becht Collection, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

1984 New York Graffiti, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark

1984 Graffiti: Tien Writers uit New York, Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands

1983 Graffiti, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands

1983 Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands

1983 Gemeentemuseum Helmond, Helmond, Netherlands

1981 New York/New Wave, P.S.1, Long Island City, NY, USA

Biennials, Triennials and Art Fairs

1984 Cologne Art Fair, Yaki Kornblit Gallery, Cologne, Germany

1984 Zurich Art Fair, Zurich, Switzerland

Selected Public Commissions and Projects

2006 Marc Ecko's Getting Up, Atari

2005 The Warriors, Rockstar Games

1980 The Sam Esses Workshop and Collection, New York, NY, USA

Selected Publications and Monographs

2009 Born in the Streets, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris

1987 Spraycan Art, Henry Chalfant and James Prigoff, Thames & Hudson

1984 Subway Art, Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, Thames & Hudson