5 Graffiti Artists Shaping The Future Of Contemporary Art

AROE, GREY, Matt Dosa, Feldman Sisters and Remi Rough all have roots in street art and have evolved into strong voices in contemporary art. Here’s a quick snapshot of each one to give a sense of their styles and influence.

I asked the artists what message they are aiming to convey through their urban art practice, and they told me about the projects they are most proud of.

AROE

AROE (UK) is a legendary graffiti writer known for his bold, letter-based work and deep ties to hip-hop culture. His pieces often blend wild style complexity with a sharp sense of design and color theory. AROE’s career began to take off in the 1980s when his sense of style was influenced by the Buffalo movement after seeing a music video for Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Buffalo Gals’ on TV in 1983.

AROE explained to me how this moment shaped his artistic vision: “The excitement and the energy of the video was like a magnifying glass illuminating a world I had never seen before, a world I now needed to be a part of. This began a lifetime of exploring graffiti and hip-hop culture, from the perspective of a white working-class kid in a seaside town in the UK. My hunger for information was insatiable and it was almost impossible to find much more than scraps of what I was searching for, so this galvanised my approach in all aspects of the culture.”

AROE has created many eye-catching, groundbreaking street art projects in his long career, including the Worldwide Graffiti letter give away, which he says was one of the hardest but rewarding things he has done as an artist. The premise was to create the 26 letters of the ‘English’ alphabet and send them to 26 cities around the World, then have them hung up to be given away for free over an eight-hour period. The logistically complex project involved creating 26 artworks then shipping them to all the locations around the World and organising 26 ‘helpers’ to place them in the agreed location before photographing them, then waiting to photograph the person who found the art.

AROE sums up the impact of devoting his life to graffiti art: “Graffiti has given me everything and cost me dearly. I’ve travelled places i could’ve only imagined, met amazing people and seen the best and the worst of what the world has to offer (Often not in the order or locations that may be obvious). Graffiti has changed a lot from what I was initially introduced to, but I feel as a practitioner it’s my duty to explore what we have at that moment as the artform mutates, both growing and dying continuously. I’m not sure if I have an actual distinct message other than art should be as emotional and passionate as you can make it and its purpose is to elicit a response regardless of whether that is positive or negative. I don’t want to create art as merely decoration, I don’t need it to match your couch or curtains.”

Recent projects include From Then On, a retrospective exhibition curated by his daughter Eden at her Brighton Gallery Helm. He says that working with his daughter was “A real thrill. I would say it is probably my favourite solo show to date and was a lot of fun creating all the paintings because of the multi-faceted way in which we chose to display the canvases. It was like making tiles or segments in the studio then composing a cohesive mosaic type image in the gallery from the pre prepared parts.”

GREY

GREY (US) was a pivotal figure of San Francisco’s Golden era of graffiti as a teenager in the late 1990s who disappeared from the public eye at the height of his fame, reemerging on the street art scene in New York City under a hidden moniker.

GREY (AKA Jonas Melvin) often uses urban decay and socio-political themes in his work, bridging graffiti aesthetics with fine art techniques to comment on resilience, identity, and transformation. Early on in his career, GREY emerged as a defining voice within San Francisco’s vibrant underground scenes of skateboarding, music, and street art, bringing a unique style that continues to influence graffiti worldwide.

GREY graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a BFA in fine art, and his work fuses technical expertise with the raw energy of the streets. After a decade of chaos, addiction and personal challenges, GREY is returning to the art world with his inaugural show in Los Angeles–Pink Cloud at Beyond the Streets—an exhibition which aims to cement his place as an innovative force in graffiti history.

GREY explains how his experience of living on the streets influenced his work: “My work often revisits the castle, a recurring motif tied to my time living on the streets and squatting. I reimagine the castle—not as a symbol of power, protection, or permanence—but as a way to question ideas of space, pride, and belonging. Housing isn’t about ownership for me; it’s about presence and participation within a place. When I was unhoused, it wasn’t about absence—it was about being deeply integrated with the urban landscape, an expansive and embodied way of existing in the world.”

Pink Cloud opens at Beyond The Streets on 18^th April, 2025. The immersive exhibition will bring together installations, paintings and sculptures by GREY as well as Alexis Ross, Alicia McCarthy, Angel Castro, Barry Mcgee, Cheryl Dunn, Dan Murphy, Dave Schubert, Elberto Muller, GKAE, Mark Cross, MERCH, Stephen ESPO Powers, Timothy Curtis, Todd James and others.

GREY’s exhibition Pink Cloud at Beyond the Streets was made possible by philanthropist Craig Shapiro, founder and Managing Partner of Collaborative Fund, an investment firm that has backed culture-defining companies including Lyft, Reddit, and The Farmer’s Dog. Shapiro has a personal connection to GREY which motivated him to support Pink Cloud–he spent a decade in San Francisco during the golden era of graffiti, where he became an admirer of GREY and his era-defining street art. A portion of the exhibition’s proceeds will benefit Feed The Streets, a nonprofit focused on homelessness and food insecurity and a cause supported by Shapiro.

Matt Dosa

Matt Dosa (UK) is an abstract graffiti artist and muralist whose work became infused with abstraction after an accident left him wheelchair-bound for a year ad he started to experiment with abstract art.

​Dosa’s vibrant work bridges the worlds of graffiti and contemporary art. Emerging from the city’s urban landscape, his art is characterized by spontaneous compositions of pattern and form, often evolving through layers of spray paint, ink, and acrylic. Dosa’s approach is experimental; he views each piece as a progression, building upon previous works to create dynamic visual narratives.

His public art includes the 2022 mural Under Many Flags in London, a community-driven project celebrating local diversity which involved a four-storey mural created in the Brutalist spiral car park at The Mall, Wood Green—commissioned by the Mayor of London—which celebrated the area’s diversity. One of Dosa’s most eye-catching private commissions is Play It Again, an artwork concept for the 2023 Universal Music’s BRITs after-party.

Beyond murals, Dosa has expanded into art fairs and galleries, exhibiting screen prints, sculpture and paintings at the Affordable Art Fair and with After Nyne Contemporary in Kings Cross. He has produced commissions for the NHS, Fabric London, Proposition Studios, GPE, Decca Records and charities including Centrepoint and the Single Homeless Project.

Dosa told me: “My work is abstract and colourful. I started out doing traditional graffiti, but after an accident left me in a wheelchair for a year, I began experimenting with abstract art. Once I was back on my feet, I started bringing the two approaches together, using graffiti techniques to paint abstract work on a much larger scale. My work today is influenced equally by my roots in graffiti and street art and by abstract art—practices I was drawn to for the freedom, instinct, and experimentation they allow. I love exploring this visual language across a range of contexts and scales—from the small, gallery-focused work I produce in my studio to huge multi-storey murals, like my project in Wood Green where I invited hundreds of local residents to design their own flags, which then fed into the final artwork. A big part of my practice also involves community—whether that’s through projects like that or working with groups facing homelessness. I try to make work that’s fun, easy for people to connect with, and open to interpretation.”

Dosa’s work continues to reflect the energy and complexity of urban life, inviting viewers to find beauty in the unexpected.

Feldman Sisters

Feldman Sisters (Ukraine) are a dynamic artist duo known for their collaborative pieces that mix vibrant color fields and layered narratives. The Feldman Sisters–Mishel and Nicol–bring a fresh, feminine and fiery voice to the street art movement.

They are emerging as powerful voices in both the urban and contemporary art scenes and their work often references their Ukrainian roots and conveys a political message.

Through layered symbolism they explore themes of identity, femininity, and resilience in the face of cultural and political upheaval. Their collaborative pieces often blend expressive brushwork with elements of muralism, creating a unique visual language that feels both raw and deeply poetic. Through exhibitions and large-scale public works, the Feldman Sisters continue to challenge traditional narratives, bringing a unique perspective to the global art conversation.

The sisters told me about the impetus behind their work: “Propaganda is one of the most powerful Russian weapons. Now our main activity is to create counterpropaganda through street art and animation, to broadcast the ideas of democracy, freedom and creation. Also, street art for us is a way to free ourselves from the pain and aggression that every citizen of Ukraine is currently experiencing. Now our world is experiencing great changes, this is especially felt when you are in Ukraine. My sister and I travel a lot and draw street art, we come up with stories on the spot, we want to convey the importance of the victory of humanity over totalitarianism, humanity is developing, new technologies and achievements in physics, psychology, ecology, we ourselves choose whether we will be a useful organism for the planet or a cancerous tumor.”

Remi Rough

Remi Rough (UK) is a key figure in the international abstract urban art movement known for bold geometric forms, vivid color palettes and a minimalist approach that still nods to his graffiti roots.

Remi Rough is also a founding member of street art collective Ikonoklast and has authored a book– Future Language of the Ikonoklast–which explores the collective’s impact on the graffiti art movement. Ikonoklast formed in 1989 and became known for their audacity and vision, which was born out of a desire to break free from the constraints of traditional graffiti art. The Ikonoklast Movement was formed by Juice 126 and counted Remi Rough, Part2, Stormboy, System, Tee Roc and Solo1 as founding members of the collective.

Rough’s book The Future Language of Ikonoklast is the first definitive chronicle of the collective’s most groundbreaking works, and maps out the history of one of the most important countercultural artist movements of the 1990s who became known as the ‘post graffiti super group’. The Future Language of Ikonoklast: Visual History of Ikonoklast Movement will be published in July by Velocity Press.

I asked Remi Rough what message he is trying to convey through his art: “I’m not really trying convey any message in particular. A lot of people ask me that, and some people have allured to the fact that abstraction doesn’t carry any kind of message, but I wholeheartedly disagree with that. Just by being an artist I am going against an established system. By painting graffiti as a kid, I was literally battling against a system and putting my name where it was not in any way welcome. Graffiti is the ‘only art movement in history, created and taken forward by children’. If that’s not making a point then I don’t know what is.”

Rough’s prolific output during a decades long career has included major street art commissions and projects as well as exhibitions all over the world. He cites some of his proudest career moments as the Megaro Hotel mural in London’s Kings Cross: “I’m still very proud of the Megaro Hotel in Kings Cross. I painted it with Steve More, Kofie and LX One back in 2012 and it’s still the largest mural in London. I think a few people were trying to say some other mural in West London was but that’s gone now, and if you look at paint per square metre, ours wins hands down.

When we were finishing it, it was April 2012 and the huge amounts of tourists arriving in London for the Olympics was insane. I stood across the road from it one day and watched literally hundreds of people stopping to take photos. The mural has faded a little during its 13 year tenure, but it’s still the most colourful building in Central London, and Time Out Magazine designated it a London Landmark a few years ago.”