D*Face

From stickers on the street to canvases

Dean Stockton, who works as D*Face, was born in London in 1978 and grew up there. He traces the beginning of everything to Henry Chalfant's photographs of New York subway graffiti in Subway Art and Spraycan Art, and then, as a teenager on a skateboard, to the deck graphics reproduced in Thrasher magazine, which pulled him toward stickers and the do it yourself instinct of skate and punk fanzines. He took an illustration and design course and worked freelance as an illustrator and designer while he put work up outside. His declared influences are a mix of the street and the newsagent: Shepard Fairey's Obey Giant campaign, the artist Jim Phillips, hip hop, punk and popular animated cartoons. The tools are spray paint, stickers, posters and stencils, and the recurring motif is a winged skull, applied to reworked comic book panels and Pop portraits until the glamour curdles.

A gallery of his own

He is unusual among his contemporaries in having built the room as well as the work. He owned and curated the Outside Institute, the first contemporary art gallery in London to concentrate on street art, and when it moved it was rebranded as the StolenSpace Gallery. His own first major London solo exhibition, Death and Glory, opened at StolenSpace and sold out in 2006. Eyecons followed at O Contemporary in Brighton in 2007, another sell out, showing new paintings, an installation and two prints.

Commissions, covers and hotels

Work made for other people has carried his images well beyond the gallery. He designed the sleeve for Christina Aguilera's album Bionic and the cover art for the Blink 182 album California, decorated a limited edition bottle for David Beckham's Haig Club whisky, and designed jewellery with the Spanish house Suarez. In 2013 he joined Art Wars at the Saatchi Gallery, curated by Ben Moore, transforming an issued stormtrooper helmet into an artwork; proceeds went to the Missing Tom Fund, set up to search for Moore's brother, and the piece was also shown on the Regents Park underground platform. In 2015 he took part in the All City Canvas Global Series with a mural across the facade of the Hotel Lisboa in Colonia Roma in Mexico City, part of the Dual Year between Mexico and the United Kingdom. In 2024 he worked through the art'otel London Hoxton, a hotel built around contemporary art, making murals, sculptures and installations across its spaces.

What the market has paid

The auction result that matters most for a seller is an early canvas rather than a print. At the Bonhams Urban Art sale in London in 2008, Pop Tart, an acrylic and spray paint stencil on canvas of 2007, signed and stamped to the stretcher and sold with a Black Rat Press provenance, made GBP 18,600 including premium. Editioned screenprints and multiples trade a long way below that, and with them the edition size, the publisher and the condition of the sheet do most of the work in a valuation.