Claudio Ethos

Claudio Rafael, better known as Claudio Ethos, is a Brazilian artist born in São Paulo in 1982. Raised among the city's pichação tags, he picked up spray cans at fifteen and left art college after two years, preferring to learn by travelling and painting walls. His murals are wall-scale translations of his ballpoint pen drawings: surreal figures with impossibly long limbs, rendered in photorealistic greyscale and surrounded by symbolic objects that stand in for emotional and spiritual states he says have no accurate name. He has painted in Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Norway and the United States, and was among the artists of the Urban Nation museum opening in Berlin in 2017.