DAIN

DAIN is an American contemporary artist whose work fuses graffiti's visual vocabulary with collage-style portraits of vintage Hollywood icons. By reworking classic imagery into urban, deconstructed likenesses of 1950s screen legends, he has earned recognition as one of New York's most influential street artists. Each piece begins with a black-and-white photograph, which he sets inside a surreal collage world built from vintage advertisements, logos, and cut-out magazine words. The figures appear in various stereotypically "feminine" poses, accompanied by his signature motif — a circled, dripping eye that reads like a graffiti-style monocle. His art has appeared in group and solo exhibitions across Paris, Berlin, Rome, Miami, and New York City, and is part of the permanent collection at Berlin's Urban Nation Museum for Urban Contemporary Art, shown alongside Banksy and Invader. In 2018, fashion and apparel brands such as Coach and Puma commissioned DAIN for public mural projects in New York City.