Pose: Couple's Therapy

The first collected works of POSE (Jordan Nickel), the Chicago graffiti writer whose paintings splice comic-strip faces and lettering into shattered, layered compositions.

Couple's Therapy follows the work through every stage: illegal walls and freight pieces, large murals in Chicago, Los Angeles and Detroit, gallery paintings and sculpture, and the studio process behind them, with more than fifty paintings and sculptures reproduced. The title names the tension the book keeps returning to, between the street and the studio, and between love, loss and triumph as the recurring subjects of the images. Text by Roger Gastman. Published by Gingko Press with Rock Enterprises in 2016 as a hardcover in its own slipcase, printed in part on neon paper, in an edition of 1,500 copies, each with a hand-pulled one-colour Color Study screen print signed by the artist.

POSE began writing graffiti in Chicago in 1992, took a degree at the Kansas City Art Institute in 2004 and is a member of the Mad Society Kings (MSK) and The Seventh Letter collectives. His later work has moved further into painting and sculpture, but the fractured pop vocabulary set out here remains its base.