D’Stassi Art Present Lady Pink: Miss Subway NYC, London, July 2025 – The suspicion was that It was always going to be impossible to see anything much in terms of the art at the Lady Pink opening last week, they have great opening nights at D’Stassi Art if you want music and drinking, if you really want to see the art you’re probably better off taking yourself over to their Shoreditch space for some quiet time with the the actual pieces and hopefully not too many bodies in the way of things. Alas D’Stassi Art is one of those places where you need to ring a doorbell and then once you are in, get followed around by a whoever he was? A salesman? A store detective? A man who would rather I was not wasting his time? A combination of all three when you really want to be left alone with time and space to soak up the art. There’s just the two of us in the space, you know he wants to get back to his game of Space Invaders or whatever he was doing before I rang the doorbell. You know he knows I’m not here to buy a piece, he’s being polite enough but you know from the body language and the awkwardness that he just wants me to go already and I just want to be left alone to properly look at the artist’s work. This isn’t just stuff, we’re not talking brands and product here, this is someone’s life, their art, their decisions, there’s emotion here and I’m feeling rushed, I’m feeling like I need to leave, I’m hastily pointing a phone at things, trying to see beyond the instant smile of the installation, wanting to spend time with her actual paintings…
Now the way the word ‘iconic’ is thoughtlessly thrown around these days by anyone and everyone describing anything and everything surely has the sane amongst us avoiding anything described as iconic like a vibrant plague. Now that photo really was iconic, that photo there in that book, that book was (and still is) so exciting, waiting for the book to come in to the local bookshop back there was exciting. I’ve written about that book before, about how back in the day when the only spray paint you could buy was foul-smelling paint (in great metallic colours) made for nothing but re-spraying cars, and how, if you bought more than one colour or can from your local car-parts shop, you were treated with more than a reasonable amount of suspicion by the man who wanted to know absolutely everything you were going to do with it. You’d have to answer an interrogation before the jobsworth in Halfords would even let you out of the shop, never mind letting you out with a bag full of fresh spray paint. Back when Wild Style was just a rumour and little hints of things were coming our way via the background of a Grandmaster Flash video or those bits between songs on that Malcolm Mclaren album we might be lucky enough to catch (there was hardly any music on TV back then), back when notions of graffiti as an art form were only just forming and no one had even considered it might evolve in to something called street art, back when tags weren’t called tags and were mostly about football gangs (well they were where I was from, the first I knew of Robbo was a name on walls around football grounds and the ICJ announced themselves on away days at railway stations with a spray can), back in that wasteland of the early 80’s a great big paint bomb of a book landed and an even bigger window opened to something really seriously exciting.
We’d heard about the art on the subways of New York, we’d seen hints of the art on the trains, the occasional photo or something in the background of a news report or an episode of Kojak, a magazine article, a Blondie video, that Duck Rock album cover (those bits between the music, the World’s Famous Supreme Team), something seen in a skate mag or an underground thrash metal zine, and then suddenly there it all was, right there all falling into some kind of place. When that great big glossy book bursting with colour and shape landed with those letter forms and those bold black outlines and a whole car? Really?! They really do that? That really was art on the street! Subway Art, the book of new York Subway graffiti Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant threw at us in 1984 landed and changed everything, there it was all laid out, exciting, fresh. I can’t recall where I heard about the book, must have read about it somewhere, had mine on order for what seemed like weeks, when it finally arrived in my local North Wales bookshop in the middle of the 80s I knew it was something very important. the woman behind the counter looked at it and me in a rather disapproving way as she told me this was a special order and not the sort of thing they’d usually sell, I wrote the date it landed on the inside of the cover, I got paint-covered sticky finger prints all over it, I sat with it for weeks, for months, it was exciting, it really was important, it just threw up so many things. I was just out of school and starting off as wet behind the ears art student, the book was scoffed at at art school, dismissed completely, it was worlds away and I was off to Halfords for more paint, experimenting with marks and layers and… And in there, along with that Duster Lizzie whole car up above everything on the elevated tracks and that shot of the New York Cops inside the carriage, was that photo, that iconic photograph by Martha Cooper, taken in 1982, a photo that captured a young Lady Pink riding the graffiti-covered NYC subway, she looked so damn cool to this kid from North Wales!
I probably should have gone to the opening, maybe said hello, I didn’t though, let her just stay forever as that photo, let her art do all her talking, sneak in early on a Saturday afternoon and hopefully see where Lady Pink is at now some 43 years on from that Martha Cooper picture. This is Lady Pink’s first solo show over here, her UK debut, we’ve seen her work in group shows before, was she at Beyond the Streets? Can’t remember now? Surely she was? We’ve not seen a substantial body of work from one of the first women to rise through the ranks of New York’s graffiti underground over here before. The show promised a full-blown recreation of a 1980s NYC subway station, complete with “archival works, fresh commissions, and a dose of unfiltered rebellion”. We’ve seen these East London recreations in galleries and such before, that railway yard fence across the gallery that time at BSMT Space and that The Right Side Of The Tracks show with Marr, Kaos and Rocco and his Brothers back in 2016 (when BSMT was a little more friendly than it maybe is now), we’d seen Moniker’s train back in 2017 (that one was pretty embarrassing), the train kind of works in here, I guess it worked a lot more at the opening when people and music were added, it maybe looks a little tiny bit lame in the people-less silence of a Saturday afternoon gallery? A little too fresh and new where these things need to naturally brew and age? Sure these things need the beautiful accident of multiple layers of different hands, in here the installation feels like fun and little more, there’s some nice enough work in and on it but then the installation and the recreation of the station with the NY subway signs aren’t the main thing here, and I’m really not dismissing the installation, the installation aspect is Lady Pink’s look back (and a good follow up in terms of the recent Angel Ortiz show in the same gallery space), the really significant thing in here though is what Lady Pink is doing now. The important thing here is Lady Pink’s new work and especially two big canvas pieces…
Lady Pink’s Subway Village Train Pink and Subway Village Train Blue (both from 2022) are alive with her here and now, or maybe her fantasy version of here and now, the two pieces are rather beautiful canvas paintings, two positive examples of where she is now. Each one of the two 60×60″ pieces (1.5 metres square in new money) capture rather intriguingly where she’s at now. Two bold bright pieces, deeply narrative. These two very bold pieces are something more than just homages to those subway trains of New York; these are rich pieces, alive, those layers that make good graff so enticing, paintings alive with intricate detail. The longer you look (as I am doing now on line rather than in that way too rushed supervised look in the gallery last Saturday afternoon), the longer you look the more there is to read into. Yes, she does, rather masterfully, rather stylishly, fuse the grit and energy of graffiti with a fine art precision, she does invite the viewer into her world, to her life or maybe her memory or her imagination or all of that together on one gulp. Kind of powerful to put these two paintings together with that photo and Lady Pink’s own rather fine painterly self-portrait version of that photo that kind of takes ownership of that time and maybe the forty odd years in between then and now.
Hey, I wasn’t that sure what to expect, I was kind of prepared to politely go in and then just as politely walk away again not really wanting to write anything, to just to politely leave her to it. I had no real expectations, or maybe I was expecting nothing more than a slightly shallow rehash of 80s graff nostalgia? What we actual get here is the kind of throwaway fun of the subway train that maybe kind of plays to the crowd along with the subway map and the signs, we get those big tile pieces that are kind neat and then there’s the rather stylish subway train line drawings and far more importantly there’s her Subway Village Train paintings and the new work, these newer Pop-flavoured slightly surrealist ambitions that kind of say well I haven’t forgotten where I came from and the train installation is fun but this is where I am now, this is where I want to go, this is me, this is Sandra Fabara, an Ecuadorian-born American painter from New York City, an artist with a rich colourful past, with a lot of history, an artist who’s best might well be yet to come. This is an excellent art show, this is a lot more than just a slice or two of graff history and New York culture, this is a show by a forward looking exciting artist, more of this new work please Lady Pink… (sw)
D’Stassi Art is found at 12 – 18 Hoxton Street (Entrance on Drysdale St), Hoxton, London, N1 6NG. The show runs until Late September 2025 (so says the gallery website), Although when the space is actually open is still anyone’s guess.
As always do click on an image to see the whole thing or to run the slide show…
THE ORGAN 