ABOVE

Raised in an environment where art was a part of his family's everyday life, Above began bombing trains in California during the mid 90's at the age of 16. Three years later when he moved to Paris, he started getting acquainted with the work of local heroes such as Invader and Zevs, and that’s when he first came up with his trademark arrow pointing upwards, hence the "above" which was already like a tag of his when he was still painting trains back in the states. Moving back to California in 2003 with a whole new set of ideas in his head, he started working on his wooden arrows and in 2004 he travelled across the country hanging over 300 of them in 14 major cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City and Detroit. This was known as Above's "U.S.A. tour". He then embarked in a "European tour" but this time he chose not to place the arrows up high hanging them from telephone cables as he did in the US, but rather on the streets of the cities he visited. In the years that followed Above continued travelling non-stop visiting 26 countries in Europe and a bunch of others in Central and South America. When he came back from his “South Central tour” that included places such as Argentina and Brazil, he created a 10 minute video called South Central Tour showing various pieces he had created while visiting those countries, featured on Wooster Collective, a website residing in NYC. In the next few years he continued working on his arrows while bouncing back and forth between Europe and the US creating meticulously put together stencil pieces not only for the fun of it such as First Love, probably his most famous work to date, but also others that had a usually thought provoking political and social touch to them such as the Naked Truth in Copenhagen and Bridge the Divide on the Berlin Wall. Being a huge urban fan himself, he was convinced that the only place where his art could fit in were the streets and therefore the only time Above’s pieces were presented indoors, was next to his friend’s and iconic French street artist Blek le Rat work, at the White Walls Gallery in San Francisco in 2010