Keith Hopewell aka Part2ism was born in 1972 in the city of York in the north of the UK. As a kid he was into drawing monsters and spaceships, listening to Mod and Punk music, and BMX freestyling. A shift occurred in 1982, as Hip Hop culture started to sweep across the globe. By 1984, these three interests had shifted to graffiti, DJing, and breaking. In the eighties, he received attention for his aesthetic success at photorealisim and his other aerosol experiments. At the turn of the 1990s with Juice126, he formed the “abstract graffiti” crew called the Ikonoklast Movement, which included members such as Remi Rough as well. The word Ikonoklast was borrowed from the theoretical texts of Rammellzee. This was a sign of allegiance and a nod of respect to a brilliant early Graffiti icon, who was well known for his poetic and mythological semiotic theories on the subject of Wildstyle graffiti, which he defined under the term Gothic Futurism.
During the nineties, another shift occurred when his hip hop group, New Flesh For Old, and his record label of the same name, gained a lot of attention and Keith became in demand as a producer, eventually working for Ninja Tune. On their experimental label, Big Dada, Keith produced seminal underground artists such as Saul Williams, Blackalicious, Roots Manuva, Anti Pop Consortium, and many more. He even invited Rammellzee, one of the most abstract and experimental of the early graffiti icons, to collaborate on the second New Flesh album.
Concurrently, at the turn of the new millennium, Keith started experimenting with a few new street and gallery series, such as Hyper-Type, the Infinity Project, and the Tamara series. Currently he has collapsed his two aesthetic paths into a synaesthasia of abstraction expressed through his Architect-Sonics sculpture series, Automatic Wall Paintings that resemble frenetic atmospheric versions of the sculptures, and his Outelligence canvas series, which resemble a data-map expression of Spacialization.
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