Artwork Description
Life After Death Artwork Giclee Limited Edition Print on 290gsm Fine Art Paper by Pop Culture Graffiti Artist Ken Flewellyn.
20x16 inches / 51x41 cm Edition of 40 Fine art print on 290gsm paper Hand-signed and numbered by the artist
Ken Flewellyn’s Life After Death: Baroque Symbolism in Street Pop Art Form
Ken Flewellyn’s Life After Death presents a meticulously rendered still life that fuses classical painting traditions with the language of Street Pop Art & Graffiti Artwork. Released as a 20 x 16 inch giclée print on 290gsm fine art paper in a signed and numbered edition of 40, the piece takes aesthetic cues from 17th-century vanitas while layering in modern hip-hop and pop culture references. With photographic precision, Flewellyn constructs a visual narrative about legacy, excess, identity, and mortality—turning familiar symbols into philosophical statements. A gold-plated skull wearing a crown rests atop a stack of magazines, evoking both royalty and finality. The juxtaposition of this memento mori with luxury objects—a Versace-styled boombox, thick gold rope chain, designer sunglasses, a spilled wine glass—highlights the tension between materialism and impermanence. The broken cigar, empty jewelry case, and antique pocket watch on a satin ribbon extend this commentary, nodding to the fragility of status and time. Like Dutch vanitas painters who used decaying fruit and extinguished candles to hint at life’s brevity, Flewellyn replaces those metaphors with consumer goods, packaging the same message for a contemporary audience.
Hyperrealism as a Tool of Cultural Synthesis
The precision of Flewellyn’s painting style is not just a technical flex—it’s a deliberate choice that elevates the visual weight of every object on the table. Each item is treated with reverence and clarity, forcing the viewer to examine them individually and collectively. Hyperrealism in this context becomes a method of preservation, much like how historical paintings immortalized wealth, nobility, or religious conviction. Here, the objects preserved are relics of urban culture, hip-hop mythology, and fashion-driven self-construction. This synthetic approach to visual storytelling is one of Flewellyn’s strengths. Rather than lean into abstraction or expressive distortion, he paints with clinical sharpness. The boombox, decorated with intricate Medusa heads and gold patterning, becomes a sacred totem. The magazines, showing muscle-bound figures and flashy headlines, serve both as cultural archive and pop commentary. The reflection in the polished orb at left even contains the outline of the artist’s studio space, collapsing the illusion of classical detachment and re-inserting the viewer into the act of creation.
Rewriting the Still Life Through Street Pop Language
Ken Flewellyn’s background in pop culture study and urban visual language allows Life After Death to operate as a cross-genre artwork. Though not made with aerosol or on public walls, its structure and symbols place it firmly in the lineage of Street Pop Art & Graffiti Artwork. The work reframes the aesthetics of graffiti—where hierarchy, identity, and legacy are constantly negotiated—through the composition and technique of high art traditions. It does not imitate graffiti stylistically; instead, it honors its values through symbolism and narrative. By reconstructing a still life with hip-hop’s material vocabulary, Flewellyn bridges historical and contemporary methods of cultural storytelling. The table becomes a battlefield of symbols—power, time, excess, fame—and the viewer is invited to read the relics for what they reveal about the pursuit of permanence in a transient world. The crown, worn by a skull, reminds us that all power is borrowed. The spilled drink, the tangled chain, the tooth—each item carries encoded meaning, transformed by the hand of the artist into a modern-day parable. Ken Flewellyn’s Life After Death captures the essence of contemporary Street Pop Art by combining the rigor of fine art painting with the immediacy of cultural critique. Through composition, symbolism, and visual clarity, it serves as a statement on mortality, self-image, and what survives after the noise fades.
