Over the Influence is proud to present ZEVS’s Temporary Sanctuary exhibition.
A leading figure in French street art during the 1990s, ZEVS has always tackled the most pressing issues of his time, treating them artistically in his own distinctive and recognizable style (clean graffiti, liquidated logos, visual attacks, etc.).
Today, as we may be witnessing the alarming twilight of the Anthropocene era, ZEVS’s attention is more than ever drawn to confronting his vision and artistic practice with it. He fully occupies all the spaces of the OTI Bangkok gallery to offer a journey that immerses us in inquiries related to the sea and the earth, and the persistence of elements. Water, air, fire, and earth are in turn summoned to create works in which the notion of stratification and long-term temporality is crucial. In doing so, the artist critically addresses the role of petrochemical industries, what they produce from fossils, and how this massive and invasive extraction to produce more energy impacts ecosystems through its toxicity—greenhouse gases, entanglement—leading to climate disruption and the undeniable destruction of nature.
ARTIST
Zevs
Born in 1977. Lives and works between Paris and Berlin
ZEVS, who began as a graffiti artist in Paris in the 1990s, has adopted various personas such as The Shadow Flasher and The Serial Ad Killer. His most recent and well-known impersonation is that of Aguirre Schwarz, the man behind the leopard skin tights. According to the story, he owes his last name to the Spanish conquistador played by Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, the Wrath of God, who ventures into the Amazon in search of El Dorado. The dark forces of his name animate him.
It was during a trial in Hong Kong in 2009 that Aguirre Schwarz, caught in the flashes of local paparazzi, made his first public appearance.
ZEVS got his name from a train that nearly ran him over as he was tagging in a subway tunnel. From 1998, he abandoned traditional graffiti in favor of painting the shadows of urban furniture in Paris. A few years later, he began visually hijacking advertising posters by painting the faces of models in red. In Berlin, in 2002, he took the Lavazza coffee brand’s icon hostage and kidnapped the 10-meter-high poster. After the hostage was released in 2005, ZEVS started to distort the logos of major brands by making them drip (liquefying them). ZEVS is also known for his “proper graffiti” works created on the dirty walls of the city. He uses a pressure washer to paint invisible messages that can only be revealed by ultraviolet light.
