Mark Wigan is one of Britain’s foremost graphic artists and an influential academic and writer. His paintings and drawings have celebrated and chronicled the worlds of street style and club culture. He is committed to intuition, spontaneity, graphic directness and the compulsion to draw. Wigan first gained attention in the mid 80s for his illustrations for iD magazine and the NME. Career highlights have included painting murals and exhibiting at London and New York's Limelight Clubs at Andy Warhol's suggestion (who described the work as 'hot'). Throughout the 80s Wigan operated as iD magazine's Roving Reporter taking thousands of polaroids of nightclubbers around the world. The Face magazine described him as 'long time Michaelangelo to London clubland's demi monde'.
Many of his projects have taken place in Japan including the Mark Wigan merchandise shops throughout Japan. Total Art live painting performances and gallery exhibitions including shows at Parco Gallery, Spiral Hall, Bell Commons, Gallery Conceal – Tokyo, Stackhouse New York, ICA, Hunt Jennings, Smiths Gallery, Diorama London, Submarine Gallery, Circulo des Bellas Artes, Madrid. Club, interior design, murals and event production including Limelight London and New York, Buddha Nagoya, P.Picasso, End, Max, Yellow, Panasonic Hall, Mix Tokyo, Nagoya City Expo, Hitachinaka City Festival, The Edinburgh Festival, The Brain club, Loveranch, Merry England, Café de Paris, Prohibition, Blow up, iT bar, Wang Dang Do, The Seen, Corsica Arts, Matsuri 93 Feet East, London. Mercedes Theatro Athens, Moon Club Reykjavik (Brain Club tour with The Happy Mondays), Acid in Osaka (Face Magazine tour).
Commissioned illustrations have been published in i-D magazine, NME, Popeye, City Limits, Brutus and X-Men, Record and CD illustrations and music videos include work for Sony CBS, De-Construction, Virgin, Go-Discs and Deviant Records for artists such as A Guy Called Gerald, Working Week, Frankie Bones and Tommy Musto and Animated. Television commercial art direction animation and set design for Fuji TV, NHK, TBS, Marui, Virgin and Parco. Poster design for CND, Suzuka Circuit, Cross FM Kyushu and Toshiba.
Wigan has recently written three books on illustration published by AVA publishing - Basics Illustration Thinking Visually, Text and Image and Sequential Images. He continues to paint, self publish books of his drawings, print limited edition silkscreen prints and t-shirts and exhibit in galleries worldwide.
