Legendary Lines

Maya Hayuk, born in Baltimore in 1969, lives and works in Brooklyn. The daughter of Ukrainian parents who arrived in the United States as refugees after the Second World War, she also studied at the University of Odessa. A studio painter and muralist, she has established herself as one of the leading voices of abstraction in public space.
In “Kilim 106” (2025), acrylic on Baltic birch, two large crosses intersect at the center of a perfectly symmetrical composition. Around them, bands of color nest together like chevrons, creating depth, almost a vibration. A few visible drips recall the painter’s gesture. The title evokes the kilim, the flat-woven rug whose geometry echoes Hayuk’s work. She draws on Ukrainian Easter eggs (pysanky), Mexican woven blankets, mandalas and Eastern European folk art, blended with pop culture and psychedelia.
Maya Hayuk is currently present in Paris. She has created two murals, visible right now: one at the Paris Anim’ Ken Saro-Wiwa center, the other at the Pavillon Carré de Baudouin, where she will present a major solo exhibition starting November 7, 2026.


Felipe Pantone, born in Buenos Aires in 1986 and now based in Valencia, grew up in Spain, where he began painting graffiti at the age of twelve under the name Pant1. His pseudonym is an extension of that tag: he only later discovered the coincidence with the name of the famous color company. He then turned to the Op Art and kinetic art of the 1960s, with Vasarely, Le Parc and above all Carlos Cruz-Diez, with whom he worked, and he transposed this language into the digital age.
“Chromadynamica #133” (2021) belongs to the series that made him known, whose title combines the Greek words for color and dynamics. Over more than three meters wide, long diagonals in black, white, blue, violet and pink slide in gradients, as if cut by fine horizontal lines reminiscent of a screen glitch. Each gradient is in fact made of very thin bands, juxtaposed like stretched pixels. This UV paint on PMMA gives the whole a luminous, almost immaterial brilliance.
Here, the graffiti line becomes that of a flow: speed, the circulation of images, the instability of the screen. Pantone sees it as a way of reflecting on our era, dominated by technology and constant change, without forgetting that, in his view, the human hand is always present in the machine.

In Miss.Tic’s work, the line has two faces. There is the line that is cut: with a cutter, she hollows out the cardboard to keep only the areas to be painted, and the stencil yields that clean, instantly recognizable contour. And there is the written line: an aphorism that accompanies the figure and makes her speak. She even turned this writing into a signature, in a typographic world that was long male-dominated.
This 2017 work comes thirty-two years after her first stencils, at the time of the publication of Flashback: 30 ans de création. It extends the civic poetry she established on the walls of Paris. She died in 2022, and Miss.Tic is recognized as one of the founders of stencil art. Her works have entered the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Fonds d’art contemporain de la Ville de Paris, and in 2024 the exhibition “À la vie, à l’amor” was dedicated to her at the Palais des Papes.


Swoon, whose real name is Caledonia Curry, is considered one of the first women to have achieved wide recognition in street art. At 22, while a student at Pratt, she began pasting her large linoleum and woodcut prints on the façades of Brooklyn and Manhattan in 1999. Her portraits, often of those close to her, are human-scale, what she calls “vessels of empathy.” In 2005, MoMA acquired her first works. In 2014, the Brooklyn Museum devoted “Submerged Motherlands” to her, the museum’s first solo exhibition dedicated to a living street artist.
“Kamayura Mylar blue / silver” (2015) is an important work. Coffee, which Swoon often uses as a pigment, gives it that warm tone of aged paper. The title refers to the Kamayurá, an Indigenous people of the Upper Xingu in Brazil. As in her projects in Haiti and Braddock, Swoon here links the beauty of the line to a social and ecological awareness: the line, engraved, hatched, cut out, becomes an act of memory.