Jone Hopper

JONE HOPPER (France, 1977).
“Baptême,” June 2024.
Spray paint, acrylic, and pastel.
Signed in the lower left corner. Signed, dated, and titled on the reverse.
Certificate of authenticity issued by the artist included.
Measurements: 46 x 38 cm; 63.5 x 55.5 cm (frame)

Jone Hopper is an urban artist and contemporary painter whose career began in the late 1980s in the world of graffiti. He taught himself on the streets, creating tags and characters with spray paint on walls and trains, and later joined forces with the artist Skepa and other graffiti artists to form the collective TBS (The Brutal Style). Hopper has deliberately kept his identity anonymous, adhering to a philosophy rooted in the origins of graffiti—that the artwork should take precedence over the creator’s personality.

As seen in the work up for auction, Jone Hopper’s painting is characterized by a fusion of the language of street art with references to the history of modern and contemporary art, particularly Cubism, Art Brut, and figurative art. The artist himself compares his creative method to the functioning of a hip-hop sampler: he selects, fragments, and recombines images and styles from different worlds to construct new compositions. Echoes of artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Basquiat, Keith Haring, Warhol, and Francis Bacon can be recognized in his works, reinterpreted through a deliberately free and expressive style. Technically, he often works by combining spray paint, acrylic, and pastel on canvas, creating figures with a strong graphic presence, defined contours, and intense colors.