As a progenitor of the style writing movement, the artist Phase 2 developed a visual language that collided typographical deconstruction with the volatility of street life, advancing subway art’s urgent scrawl into a dense cosmology of form. This five-decade survey of his work includes 25 examples across paper, canvas, and aluminum engravings and still only glances at the magnitude of his contributions to hip-hop culture. (He was an accomplished dancer, improving upon the breaking and uprock styles and assembling the B-boy crew New York City Breakers, as well as a graphic designer, developing the geometric cut-and-paste aesthetic he called “Funky Nous Deco” for party fliers that popularized the foundational music of the period).
But his voice was clearest in paint. Credited with inventing the bubble letter technique — known as “softies” for their inflated, pillowy look, and later, accelerating the “wildstyle” evolution, a kinetic, labyrinthine expressionism that traded legibility for propulsiveness, Phase 2 embraced a totalizing vision of aerosol art. He rejected the “G word” (meaning graffiti), its insufficiency he likened to “calling a meteor a pebble.”
The show charts his progression into increasingly florid work — near-cryptic symbology woven into baroque, calligraphic abstraction, which he made nearly until his death in 2019. That restlessness is evident in the insistence of his line, as in “Hieroglyphs” (1987): fluid, continuous, without a discernible end point. As he explained of his nom de plume, in typically oracular fashion: “One is a beginning and two is the next step. Two is forever.”
-Max Lakin
