
DAVID HOLLIER
Instagram: @davidhollierart
ABOUT THE ARTIST
“I love doing murals,” says British-born artist David Hollier. “It’s not just the challenge of creating artwork at such a giant scale that appeals to me, but also the opportunity to communicate things I feel strongly about.” Hollier currently lives in Bushwick, a neighborhood in Brooklyn known for its thriving street art culture and industrial aesthetic. His art appears all over the city—on the streets as well as in solo exhibitions.
The striking nature of Hollier’s portraits are twofold; they are intense and penetrating renditions of iconic figures—Nelson Mandela, Marilyn Monroe, Frida Kahlo, the Beatles—created entirely with painted or typed text, often from speeches, songs or quotes from those figures.
Early on in his career, Hollier had used lines in his works, before words. “When a friend commissioned me to create a portrait of her husband using words, I incorporated a brief biography into the portrait and the response was so positive that I continued working in this style,” Hollier explains. “By 2012 I’d given the collection the name Imago Verbosa, meaning a picture made of words in Latin.”
“I started mainly with black on white, originally, pen and ink,” said Hollier. “And that evolved, and I started working on a typewriter, which again was black ink on paper. “It then quickly evolved to acrylic on canvas or board—traditionally I'm a painter. But then I progressed to swapping that and moving to a black background, which allowed me to introduce color to the images.”
David Hollier was the first mural artist to paint on the 69th floor of 4 WTC in 2016. He selected a large wall on the south side of the core of the building to paint his “$10 Bill” featuring Alexander Hamilton, comprised of the text from the hit Broadway show “Hamilton.” The mural overlooked Trinity Church, a few blocks to the south, where Hamilton is buried.





