MYLES CARTER AKA MEO COP 9 (1965- 2018)

Myles Carter, also known as MEO COP (Son of jazzman Ron Carter).
“Myles Carter is an American painter and graffiti artist, who has, over the years, developed a style that is deeply rooted in a conceptual framework that embodies the aesthetics, ideals and social structures.

Myles Carter was born 1965 in New York City and grew up in Manhattan’s Upper West side, in an environment that nurtured creativity – his father Ron is a renowned jazz bassist and his mother was a longtime trustee of the Studio Museum in Harlem. After attending the Bank Street School, Myles was accepted into JHS 104 on East 21st Street which required a portfolio submission and passing an entrance exam for admittance. High school followed at Music and Art. Additionally, he went to the Art Students League ‘for drawing nudes and still lifes’, he says. Of this foundation he says, ‘that was my artistic root. Parallel to all of that structured art instruction I also was a graffiti writer.’ He had an early awareness of graffiti through the tagged subway cars of the early 1970’s.

Using the pseudonym Metro, in the late 1970s and 1980s, he was associated with crews such as RTW – Rolling Thunder Writers, noted for experimentation with unusual brands of paint and getting distinctive results. His tag Metro had evolved over time into MEO – Mathematical Equation Of… ‘In my art there’s a lot of mathematics’, as the artist himself states.

Myles’ move to Paris in the late 1980s, while he was still in his early 20s, helped broaden his perspectives on art, deepen his consciousness and make the transition from spray-can to the brush. Myles Carter’s paintings evince vitality, high energy and dramatic impact because of his seemingly spontaneous and intense style that focuses less, or not at all, on figures or imagery, but on the actual brush strokes and use of canvas. His oeuvre include seminal work such as his Mail Bag series that were executed during his stay in France in the 1980s, and a recent work that synthesize calligraphic gestures with a fluid compositional organization. Carter’s work is dense with visual overload, and reflects an awareness of a vast array of both formal and inherited traditions spawned by graffiti’s social intervention that flowered spectacularly on the streets and subways of New York City during the 1970s and 1980s. Myles Carter has participated in several exhibitions in the US and abroad. His work is in several collections around the world.

Myles Carter AKA MEO

Angst
Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 23,6 x 43,3
Provenance: Wild Stylerz Gallery, Paris 2011

Myles Carter AKA MEO (1965-2018)

Musik
Acrylic on coffee bags
Size: approximate: 35 by 90 inches
Provenance: Wild Stylerz Gallery, Paris 2011