Clown Soldier by Clown Soldier

Doug Groupp has been working as a street artist in New York City for the past 12 years. In 2009, he adopted the name Clown Soldier and pasted the first wheat paste of his image of a clown in a revolutionary war-era soldier's uniform, playing on the incongruity of the two identities. The Clown Soldier image also refers to the absurd and playful nature of creating art, "clowning around" with color, line, image and form. The fun and excitement of working in public spaces and creating chance encounters for the viewer, not only with his images but with the spaces themselves, has inspired Groupp to focus on street art over studio work. 

Doug Groupp aka Clown Soldier’s most recent work utilizes a variety of images sourced from textbooks to industrial design. These materials are ready-made, allowing Groupp to employ an "immediate" technique, an instinctive re-contextualization of found components resulting in new forms. Groupp's distinctive approach employs collage and painting as discrete syntactical forms within his own artistic language.

Artist Statement:

My works can be characterized as playful and incongruous, but can also be seen as hieroglyphic.  Fragments are pieced together or painted until a wholeness of form is finally revealed. Interpreting and divining the moment of a work's completion, as well as the potential of the image to bear meaning, is a significant part of my artistic efforts. However, the coupling of the hermeneutic with the ridiculous ultimately thwarts any attempt to establish a primary meaning, instead allowing the work to exist organically, both in the process-oriented creation of form and in its capacity to generate a multitude of responses and interpretive possibilities within the viewer.

Groupp's work has been exhibited worldwide, including but not limited to New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Florida, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Berlin, and Denmark.