Steve Keene lives and works in a garage building in Brooklyn, NY. He originally came from Virginia and he went to Yale Graduate School of Fine Arts. The concept of SK Art developed around 1993 and grew in part from Steve’s friendship and admiration for musicians. He spent a few years as a DJ on a Virginia college radio station where surrounded by thousands of records, it was harder to find something he didn’t like than something he did. Steve says, “I want buying my paintings to be like buying a CD: it’s art, it’s cheap and it changes your life, but the object has no status. Musicians create something for the moment, something with no boundaries and that kind of expansiveness is what I want to come across in my work.” In the past few years he has collaborated with the Silver Jews, Pavement, The Apples in Stereo and Martin’s Folly to create album art and video sets. Currently, Steve has sold more than 200,000 paintings.
Often, when Steve shows his art, he literally moves in and paints on site. Recently he has shown at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, at Rice University in Houston, at The Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany and at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in Los Angeles.
Even though they are created as multiples, each of Steve’s paintings is one-of-a-kind. He works constantly, producing walls full of work everyday. He considers each individual piece as a sort of souvenir of a day and a participant in the larger, ongoing event of SK Art.
