John Wentz

John Wentz grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and started drawing at six, copying Batman and Spider-Man comics panel by panel. He first worked in commercial art, painting murals and billboards and freelancing as an illustrator and graphic designer, which is how he taught himself to paint, first with an airbrush and later in oils. His paintings strip people and places down to their basic elements, with the human figure as a recurring subject, and look at how ordinary things come to be treated with reverence. Alongside nine solo shows, including Stolen Space Gallery in London (2021), he took part in an exhibition at the de Young Museum in 2023, and has painted murals in Martinique, Mexico and France. In 2022 the Points de Vue festival's "Un autre point de vue" residency brought him to Isturits, where the mayor gave him the village's fronton and entrance to paint.