Fafi

The French artist Fafi (born 1976, Toulouse, France) is currently participating with three works in the group exhibition 'Viva Lolita' at the London gallery Maddox Arts. The exhibition, curated by James Putnam, will be showing until 25 April.

Fafi's strong presence in the graffiti and fine arts scene was first witnessed on her hometown walls in 1994. Back then, as she was painting and hustling, her sexy, funny, and sometimes aggressive girl characters made the whole world look and help kick-start a whole new graphic language; by exploring feminity through stereotypes, and using it to her advantage, she drew enormous attention and thus started to travel the world with thousands of Fafinettes in her brushes and paint cans. Europe, USA, Japan, Hong-Kong, the planet is a playground. And it's only started.
Soon enough Sony would ask her to design a six-character toy set for the Time Capsules collection, an almost natural move for her three-dimensional measures. Other successful figurines would follow, as well as numerous expositions and collaborations with Colette, Adidas, LeSportSac, Coca-Cola and countless press stories in the most prestigious magazines (ie. Vogue, Elle, The Face, XLR8R, Yen etc...).
The animation world started to eyeblink her vision in Mark Ronson video featuring a Fafi-ed Lily Allen.

'Viva Lolita' presents a range of contemporary artists' depictions of young teenage girls that capture the mingling of fading innocence with emerging sexuality. Inspired by the title of Vladimir Nabokov's notorious book, 'Lolita' has since been coined as a word, with seemingly widening connotations, for a sexy young teenage girl.

'Viva Lolita' brings together a selection of existing and specially commissioned works by 18 international artists. The artists exhibiting with Fafi are Charlotte Beaudry (Belgium), Edvarda Braanaas (Norway), Koichi Enomoto (Japan), Mark Karasick (Canada), Feng Qianyu (China), Nick Ruston (UK), Nazif Topcuoglu (Turkey), Li Bo (China), Hellen Van Meene (the Netherlands), Trevor Brown (UK), Nobuyoshi Araki (Japan), Heli Rekula (Finland), Lei Benben (China), Stu Mead (USA), Jens Lucking (Germany) Andrea Massaioli (Italy), Mat Collishaw (UK)