Ministry -Nick Walker – Black Nozzle

Nick Walker – Black Nozzle

Nick Walker (born in 1969) is a established graffiti artist originating from Bristol, England. He is part of the stencil graffiti movement, which was started by Robert Del Naja in the 1980s, and had a great amount of influence on artists such as Banksy. Walker was invited by film director Stanley Kubrick to recreate the graffiti’d streets of New York for his 1999 film, Eyes Wide Shut.

His paintings often feature a gentleman called “vandal” with a bowlerhat, which featured in a video by The Black Eyed Peas.

Walker’s paintings now sell for large sums of money. In 2006 a spray painted work titled “Moona Lisa” sold for an unexpected £54,000 at Bonhams in London. At a solo exhibition at London’s Black Rat Gallery in 2008, £750,000 worth of art sold. Besides, there were dozens of people camping overnight in front of the gallery.

Walker was a major participant in the 2011 See No Evil event in Bristol, where he painted “perhaps the most striking piece at the event”. One of his gentelman with bowlerhat on the side of a tower block in Nelson Street.

Nick Walker had been the very first artist-in-residence of the Quin Arts program at the Quin hotel in New York City. Walker created 15 original pieces on-site for the Quin’s permanent collection during his residency in 2013. In 2016, Nick Walker viseted the hotel again to showcase both historic images, as well as a new vocabulary of abstraction. This solo exhibition introduced 25 original works and opened the hotel’s Quin Arts programme for the 2016 season.

Walker still lives in Bristol.

Ministry of Walls would like to present one of his artworks, Black Nozzle, in more detail here.