Alex Young (Odisy)

Alex Young, founding member of Brighton’s world famous Heavy Artillery Crew, is a multi-faceted artist just as comfortable creating striking characters on walls, canvases and digital landscapes as he is on human skin. His style is instantly recognisable, displaying an underlying sense of powerful graphic attitude, an artistic anger formed in his early years as a graffiti writer on the streets of London.

Alex’s first solo exhibition took place in July 2008. Entitled EXHIBITIONISM, the collection of portraits and studies explored the notion of the dual identities of artists and performers, more specifically the alter egos of strippers and table dancers.

Utilising the traditional portrait process coupled to in-depth interviews with the performers, the body of work revealed compromisingly honest depictions, Alex skillfully expressing both the seen and unseen natures of his subjects in acrylic and spray paint.

Now residing in Brighton and working as a freelance Illustrator, Alex still paints under an assumed alias across the globe. “My art work is not graffiti and my graffiti is not art. This is why I keep my two names separate,” he states, his fascinating artistic cause seemingly just as dichotomous as those of his subjects...