N

80% of the hammer price is allocated to support the non-profit foundation Spolu s odvahou, a member of the Bátor Tábor Family.

2rock, Key, Tron—behind these monikers hides the street art of Michal Škapa (1978), who is a member of an impressive generation of Czech graffiti artists that emerged in the mid-1990s. Many of these artists, including Škapa, gradually shifted from the underground to the gallery, where they are now enjoying considerable success. In the year 2000, Škapa and his generational colleagues made a legendary trip to New York, where they realized several large-scale illegal works in the subway, which are still considered a landmark of the Czech street art scene. A decade later, however, they were already part of the Czech pavilion at EXPO 2010 in Shanghai as institutionally successful artists. Škapa currently uses a diverse range of techniques, from classical mural painting in the public space to acrylic and airbrush on canvas to objects and site-specific installations. The painting N is based on the principle of graffiti writers’ tags. It consists of a canvas covered in a kind of illegible quasi-writing, to which the artist has attached another ambiguous symbol in the form of a neon tube. The image is one piece of a four-part whole in which the neon tube of the painting N makes up just one component of a four-character statement.