Biography

David Négri, better known as the artist SKUNKDOG, is a painter whose artistic career is steeped in a passion for freedom of expression, music and street culture. Born in an era marked by the punk movement and influenced by musical icons such as Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, SkunkDog drew his creative energy from this rebellious universe.

From the outset, SkunkDog was drawn to books, music and the rejection of social norms. It was thanks to Patti Smith that he adopted his artist name, SkunkDog. The artist then threw himself heart and soul into this artistic adventure, fuelled by an insatiable appetite for the shapes and signs that sprang from his pencils and brushes. Seeking to exploit every square centimetre of his canvases, he used a mixture of earth, coffee and resin, scratching and scarifying their surface to create an aesthetic reminiscent of a wall constantly tagged and erased. In this way, SkunkDog's canvases have become spaces of projection where his imagination unfolds to the full. They absorb, transform and restore his fantasies, memories, cultural references and even fragments of poems or stickers.

Although his style was forged on the street, the subjects and characters in SkunkDog's paintings are far from realistic. They are only partly influenced by observation of the visible world. On the contrary, they are born of his emotions when confronted with other works of art, other artists and other eras. SkunkDog revisits the great myths that structure our collective sensibility and reinterprets them in his own way, using flat, bright colours to create paintings imbued with deep symbolism.