Dan Witz's 'American Baroque' at Wunderkammern: Street Art Pioneer's Hyperrealist Rebellion

Dan Witz, a pioneering street artist born in Chicago in 1957 and based in New York since the late 1970s, presents 'American Baroque' at Wunderkammern in Milan. The exhibition features fifteen oil paintings on canvas and panel, including large-scale scenes of punk-hardcore pogos and raves, grotesque orgiastic crowds from his Scrum series, and small dreamlike portraits. Created over the past four years, these works explore liminal spaces and 21st-century anxiety through traditional chiaroscuro, which Witz describes as an updated version of academic realism. Witz maintains two separate bodies of work: studio pieces for commercial shows and street art, which he sees as a release from market pressures. His ongoing project 'Early Sunday Morning', a homage to Edward Hopper, involves collaborative photoshoots where subjects enact extreme scenarios, culminating in a self-portrait as his King Baby alter ego. Witz has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, and collaborated with Dior in 2017.