Fake

FAKE is a Dutch artist, born in 1980, who works in Amsterdam. He is self-taught and works principally in stencil — a form he handles with unusual precision, cutting in multiple layers to build tonal range rather than relying on the single flat silhouette that most street stencilling settles for.

The images are built on a reversal. A familiar photographic source — a portrait, a news image, a piece of advertising — is rendered cleanly and then turned by a single alteration that inverts its meaning. The humour is dry and the technique is deliberately immaculate, so that the joke lands with the authority of the image it is undermining. Recurring subjects include love and its failures, consumption, and the gap between how people present themselves and what is actually happening.

He works in high-key colour on saturated grounds, often against a flat field that isolates the figure. Where much stencil work depends on the texture of the wall it is sprayed onto, FAKE's carries the same finish indoors and out, and the studio paintings are continuous with the street work rather than translations of it.

Among his recurring motifs is FAKE love, a treatment of heartbreak that has appeared in many versions across walls and canvases and has become the work most associated with him. The subject suits the method: an emotional register usually handled with sincerity, delivered instead through a technique built for advertising, at the scale and finish of advertising, so that the feeling and its packaging arrive together.

Placement matters to how the work reads. In Amsterdam his pieces sit in the ordinary fabric of the city rather than in designated walls or festival sites, and the surrounding architecture does much of the work of framing them. He has shown across the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and the United States, and as far afield as Iran, and remains one of the most visible figures in Amsterdam's street art scene.

SELECTED CV

Born 1980, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Education and Training

Self-taught

Selected Group Exhibitions

2013 ˈsten(t)-səl: Stencil Art Group Show, Vertical Gallery, Chicago, IL, USA

Selected Public Commissions and Projects

2005 Street works and murals in Amsterdam, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles, Madrid, Copenhagen, Oslo and Bangkok, from 2005

Selected Public and Institutional Collections

Rabobank Art Collection, Netherlands