Mick La Rock

Mick La Rock (Aileen Middel, Groningen, 1970) is Europe’s first and most well known graffiti artist. A scholar of the traditional ‘New York School’ graffiti lettering style, she started writing her name MICKEY passionately in 1983. Conquering The Netherlands in the 80’s, she extended her playground internationally in the 90’s and 2000’s. Graffiti artists like Dondi, Futura2000, Lady Pink, Blade, Lee Quinones and Quik invited her to come to New York after they met at the exhibition ‘Coming from The Subway’ at the Groninger Museum in 1992. During the 90’s – 00’s she worked and lived in both Amsterdam and New York, where she collaborated on big mural productions and became part of the New York graffiti scene. After mastering the art, and working together with most other internationally known graffiti artists (a.o. Iz The Wiz, Kase2, Sento, Smith, Claw, Can2, Bates, Smash137, Zedz, Atome, Neon, Milk, Loomit, Musa) she started to look for new challenges.

Intrigued by the question: “What does a letter do when it doesn’t have to be read anymore”, she alienates every element of her old graffiti name into abstraction, away from their original essence and composition. Her minimalistic two-dimensional and three-dimensional work show influences of brutalist mid 20st century architecture and early 20st century Russian abstract art.

Mick La Rock graduated from the Hanzehogeschool Groningen and took classes at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy for Fine Arts, Amsterdam.

For the Amsterdam Museum she was the guest curator for the exhibition “Graffiti. New York meets The Dam”(2015-‘16).

For the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam she painted “Au Bonheur Des Dames”, a collaborative mural with Polish artist Paulina Olowska (2013).

LaRock was featured in the graffiti art documentaries “Bomb It” (2006) and ‘Girl Power Movie’ (2015)

Her work has been published in retrospective graffiti books like “Burning New York” – James & Karla Murray(2002), “Graffiti Woman” – Nicholas Ganz (2006), “Graffiti365” – Jay Adlin (2011), ‘World Piecebook’ – S. Jenkins & D. Villorente (2011).

She is a proud member of graffiti crews The Fantastic Partners, The Master Blasters, Clowns From Hell (NL) and All Female Crew.