Piet Parra work is instantly recognizable. Many artists claim to have a unique style, there are only a handful of artists whose work is instantly recognizable. Pieter Janssen (aka Piet Parra) is a Dutch artist who is based in Amsterdam. He is most well-known for his post-pop imagery and curved designs. He is often compared to Keith Haring or Victor Moscoso.
He is also well-known for his vibrant colors and hand-drawn letters; worlds are populated by surreal, hybrid characters. He quickly became a respected and eclectic artist around the globe.
Who is Piet Parra?
He was born in The Netherlands in 1976 and currently resides in Amsterdam. He began his career in the 1990s in Amsterdam, creating flyers and drawing posters for music venues. Piet Parra's unique style is easily identifiable and transcends all genres in his animation, painting, and drawing. In his practice of fine art, he eventually applied his eccentric approach and hand-drawn approach to design and illustration.
Parra paints faceless female characters using flat, saturated colors of bright blues, reds and pinks. Dutch painter, illustrator, animator, and painter Parra has also created cartoon-like characters with beaks or other bird-like heads.
Piet Parra's drawings, paintings and sculptures have been displayed in galleries throughout Europe, Japan, and North America. Parra is also the co-founder of Rockwell by Parra, an apparel label. He is also a member and founder of electronic music group Le Le.
Piet Parra has even tapped into merchandise, his website at the moment claims to sell more merchandise than art. Anything from caps, shirts, shorts and other accessories. Piet Parra has even done a collaboration with Nike for a few sneakers.
Piet Parra Art
Piet Parra is known for his minimalist and reductive visual vocabulary. His work has a unique magnetism. His fine art has been characterized by elegant line work and bold, complementary colors. His work is distinctive. His bold, poppy graphics recall the work of famous pop artists Roy Lichtenstein or Tom Wesselmann.
No Work Today (2016), one of his works, explores simple leisurely pleasures such as reading a book in bed or reclining by the poolside. His work is well-known for its bird-like characters and hybridized characters. This reduction of forms is explored further in other works, such as The Floods. Their flat, solid shapes suggest a figure. The limbs and head fit together like a puzzle. Another type of art Piet Parra has been skatedecks, artist creating skateboard designs has been a trend over the last few years.
He has organized several international exhibitions, including a retrospective at Rotterdam Kunsthal in 2015 and a mural of 60 feet at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2012). The prestigious D&AD Silver Pencil Award for Illustration and the Dutch Design Award in 2010 were won by Piet Parra.
Recently, Parra's artwork was exhibited at Takashi Murakami's and Juxtapoz Magazine’s joint exhibition Juxtapoz x Superflat. This continued Murakami’s vision of combining contemporary art with various subcultures exhibited side by side.
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