A painter’s foundation, a love of hip-hop and a taste for horror come together in Mashkow’s graffiti-covered portraits.
Mashkow’s portraits come with another layer of identity. Across realistic faces, tags and graphic marks turn the image into something that feels pulled from a city wall. The likeness draws you in. The graffiti keeps your eyes moving. His own website makes that connection explicit, comparing the changing human face with the constant disappearance and return of graffiti on city streets. Mashkow’s official website
Alexey Mashkow is a New York-based tattoo artist whose studio, Love Machine, lists his specialties as Graffiti Face, abstract color realism and black-and-grey realism. Portraits sit alongside street culture, movie characters, cars and architecture in his practice. That range gives him plenty of material, but the collision between a recognizable face and the marks covering it is the clearest introduction to his work. Love Machine artist profile
A PAINTER BEFORE THE TATTOO MACHINE
Mashkow grew up near Sergiev Posad in Russia’s Moscow region, in a family of artists. In a 2019 interview with iNKPPL, he described studying painting at Abramtsevo Art Industrial College and entering tattooing when a friend brought him equipment and asked him to finish an old tattoo. His background began with drawing and painting, long before the graffiti-covered portraits became his calling card. iNKPPL interview, October 8, 2019
He dates the start of his tattoo career to 2011. Speaking to Inked in March 2019, he explained the ingredients of his developing style: portrait painting, the hip-hop culture of the 1980s and 1990s, and his love of horror. Those interests gave him a way to bring familiar subjects into a more unruly visual world. Inked interview, March 28, 2019
FAMILIAR FACES, DIFFERENT RULES
The portrait gives the viewer something to recognize. The graffiti gives it another personality. Read as an image, the result holds two ideas together: the face as a likeness and the face as a surface someone has marked, claimed and changed.
His Dolly Parton portrait makes that approach easy to see. Platinum hair frames the face, green “JOLENE” lettering crosses the forehead, and an orange butterfly sits at the neck. The familiar subject and the added marks give the eye different things to follow within the same image. Dolly Parton tattoo
That approach also travels beyond skin. Superchief Gallery documents his 2022 solo exhibition, ARE U REAL, which brought his imagery into animated work made with collaborators and music by HEARSE T. Painting, tattooing and digital work give him different places to explore the same interest in transformed faces and urban imagery. Superchief Gallery artist page
For anyone watching where portrait tattooing can go, Mashkow offers a clear reason to pay attention. Recognition is only the beginning. What happens across the surface gives the portrait its attitude.
Explore more of his work at @_mashkow_ and mashkow.tattoo.
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