John Crash Matos

CRASH was born John Matos in the Bronx in 1961 and began writing on the New York subway at thirteen, following older writers from his neighbourhood into the train yards. The name came from crashing a computer at school. By 1980 he had begun moving the work indoors, and that year he organised Graffiti Art Success for America at Fashion Moda in the South Bronx — an exhibition generally treated as the moment the subway generation entered the gallery system on its own terms rather than as somebody else's subject matter.

The paintings are built from comic books. Ben-Day dots, speech balloons, cropped faces, hard black outlines and the flattened colour of cheap four-colour printing are combined with wildstyle lettering and aerosol handling, so that a canvas reads as a page and a train car at once. Where Pop took the comic frame as found material and cooled it, CRASH keeps its heat: the sources are the ones he actually read, and the paintings retain the speed and compression of work made to be seen from a moving platform.

Colour is where the two halves fuse. He works in saturated, unmodulated fields laid down with spray, with sharp transitions and almost no atmospheric depth, and lets lettering dissolve into and out of figuration across a single surface. Faces surface and submerge; a word becomes a shape and then a word again. That instability has kept the work from settling into either Pop pastiche or graffiti nostalgia across four decades.

He showed with Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1984, 1986, 1988 and 1992, and with Yaki Kornblit in Amsterdam through the mid-1980s, at a moment when very few writers were being handled by galleries of that standing. Institutional presentations have included a retrospective at the Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin in 1993, American Graffiti: CRASH & DAZE at the Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain in Nice in 1999, Post-Graffiti New York at the Veranneman Foundation in Belgium in 2001, and From the 4 Trains to Fenders at Fairfield University in 2010.

He has painted guitars for Fender, including a Stratocaster made for the instrument's fiftieth anniversary, and murals throughout the Bronx, and he co-owns Wallworks New York, a contemporary gallery in the borough he has never left. His work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Delaware Art Museum and the Boca Raton Museum of Art.

SELECTED CV

Born 1961, New York, NY, USA

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2025 Seasons, Bonnet-Abelin Gallery, Lyon, France

2025 50, AtDown Gallery, Montpellier, France

2025 Amanacer, SPOT, San Juan, Puerto Rico

2024 Urban Odyssey, JoAnne Artman Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2024 Bringing It Forward, Mucciaccia Gallery, London, United Kingdom

2024 Echoes of the Past, Ghost Galerie, Paris, France

2023 Shape of Things to Come, JoAnne Artman Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2023 CRASHONE: Subway / Canvas / Street, Oever Gallery, Ostend, Belgium

2023 The Modern Hero, EF Arte, Milan, Italy

2022 Stamped for Life, Galerie Wallworks, Paris, France

2022 Scripted Memories, Thinkspace Projects, Los Angeles, CA, USA

2021 Celebrating 45 Years, JoAnne Artman Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA, USA

2021 45 Years Later, WYN317 Gallery, Miami, FL, USA

2020 Genesis, Speerstra Gallery, Paris, France

2020 The Quarantine Machine, 212 Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2019 Textures, Kolly Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland

2019 Precious, AtDown Galerie, Montpellier, France

2018 Full Circle, Galerie Brugier-Rigail, Paris, France

Selected Group Exhibitions

2024 High Summer Vibes, Ghost Galerie, Château de la Gaude, Provence, France

2024 Bits and Pieces, WYN317 Gallery, Miami, FL, USA

2023 The Italian Job, Arena Studio d'Arte, Verona, Italy

2018 Life of Icons, Speerstra Gallery, Paris, France

2018 CRASH, PRO176, SOTEN, 44309 Street Art Gallery, Dortmund, Germany

2018 Concrete Jungle, JoAnne Artman Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2017 Breaking Ground: Defining the Urban Experience, JoAnne Artman Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA, USA

2017 For the Love of Paper, Galerie Slilka, Lyon, France

2016 Movement Revisited, Galerie Zimmerling & Jungfleisch, Saarbrücken, Germany

2016 Breaking Ground: Defining the Urban Experience, JoAnne Artman Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2014 FLOW, Dorian Grey Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2014 Broken English, Jonathan LeVine Gallery, New York, NY, USA

Museum and Institutional Exhibitions

2015 Then and Now (solo), Villa Tamaris Centre d'Art, La Seyne-sur-Mer, France

2010 From the 4 Trains to Fenders: A Retrospective (solo), Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery, Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT, USA

2008 CRASH (solo), Williams Art Gallery, Lafayette College, Easton, PA, USA

2007 DCC Crashes, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI, USA

2004 Fender Stratocaster 50th Anniversary, Fender Museum, Corona, CA, USA

2002 Barrios (solo), Hostos Art Gallery, Hostos Community College, City University of New York, Bronx, NY, USA

2001 Post-Graffiti New York: Crash — Toxic, Veranneman Foundation, Kruishoutem, Belgium

1999 American Graffiti: CRASH & DAZE, Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice, France

1999 CRASH and DAZE: On the Express Train 1977–1999, Palais Liechtenstein, Feldkirch, Austria

1994 CRASH / DAZE: Recent Works, York College, City University of New York, Queens, NY, USA

1993 Through Express Part I (solo retrospective), Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, TX, USA

1993 Hostos Art Gallery, Eugenio María de Hostos Community College, City University of New York, Bronx, NY, USA

Biennials, Triennials and Art Fairs

2025 Urban Art Fair Paris, Thinkspace Projects, Paris, France

2024 Art Miami, Miami, FL, USA

2024 Red Dot Miami, Miami, FL, USA

2024 Hamptons Fine Art Fair, Southampton, NY, USA

2019 Art Élysées, Paris, France

2018 SCOPE Miami Beach, Miami Beach, FL, USA

Selected Public Commissions and Projects

2011 Mural installation with TATS CRU and DAZE, Bronx, NY, USA

2004 Fender Stratocaster 50th Anniversary guitar design, Fender Musical Instruments, Corona, CA, USA

Selected Public and Institutional Collections

Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, USA

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA, USA

Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE, USA

Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL, USA