Artwork Description
Swoon – Daniella, Buenos Aires 7
Dimensions: 20 x 22.25″
Year: 2023
Medium: silkscreen, acrylic gouache and cut paper on wood
Swoon is widely regarded as the most influential street artist. Her wheat-pasted portraits of everyday people appear on building walls throughout the world, from Hong Kong to Haiti. Most of her street contemporaries, like JR and Banksy, are men. Swoon was the first female street artist to break through in a major way, and inspired a new generation of women artists. Swoon broke through generational trauma, as well, and her sensitive portraits of people she met along the way deliver a potent, and deeply humane standard. Her work is the subject of an upcoming international retrospective, and is shown in museums worldwide.
With Moni and the Sphinx, Swoon created a mythologized portrait of one of her central collaborators and muses, fellow artist Monica Canilao. Swoon says of the work, “Wisdom, boundaries, the fecundity, and ferocity of nature are all being thought out within the forms in her dress. She’s emerging from, or is balanced on, a series of eggs and earths, rooting trees and river beds. There’s a sense of lightning coming from her fingers, which I let emerge organically out of the drawing because Monica is someone whose creativity seems to flow from her fingertips as naturally as spider’s silk and as spontaneously as lightning.”