Los Angeles  D*face Captain America

Hiding in plain sight across from the Los Angeles County Museum LACMA is a fascinating piece of street art and world history - graffiti murals on a chunk of the Berlin Wall in Los Angeles. An art installation commissioned by the Wende Museum in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The installation features works by Herakut, Retna and an unsettling Captain America interpretation by D*Face. 

The artist D*Face’s sardonic take on Marvel’s Captain America, arguably the embodiment of American ideals, replaces the iconic superhero with his own undead, corrupted doppelgänger. The zombified alter ego, emerging from a Western cityscape littered with relics of American consumerism breaks through to the other side of the wall—the east side. Painted and stenciled on an original slab of the Berlin Wall the mural can be seen as the corpse of questionable Western values breaching a formerly impenetrable ideological barrier. It aligns seamlessly with D*Face’s broader critique of unbridled consumerism and the unreflected attachment to bankrupt ideologies. Influenced by punk music, graffiti, skateboarding, and obvious in this piece - comics, his work can be seen across a variety of different media applying his cheeky imagery with anti-establishment values.

All I’ve ever tried to do is get the public to question what they surround themselves with, what is important to them, and if there is an alternative to consider it and try it. Support the local store and local coffee shop, but most importantly, don’t gauge your success or happiness against what you’re fed or what products you own."
- D*Face in a Whitewalls Interview 
 

D*Face

D*Face (aka Dean Stockton) is a London-based multi-disciplinary British artist. D*Face creates irreverent murals, paintings and sculptures that critique the modern world, in particular consumerism and the elusive American Dream. He uses spray paint, stickers, posters, stencils and brushes to bring to life his pop-inflected body of work which features reoccurring themes about celebrity, fame and mortality. D*Face started his artistic journey by creating dysfunctional characters on paper with a pencil inspired by his passion as a child for graffiti and comic books. Later on, he expanded his work on walls and galleries adding to his characters his signature wings that can be seen on many of his work today. The work of D*Face, that evokes the styles of Lichtenstein and Warhol, can be seen in the streets and galleries around the world.

The Wall Project

was a public art initiative of the Wende Museum commemorating the 20th anniversary of the toppling of the Berlin Wall. It featured the creation of two walls: the Wall Along Wilshire and the Wall Across Wilshire. Composed of ten sections of the original Berlin Wall, the Wall Along Wilshire recalls a section of the Wall known as the East Side Gallery made famous by the artists who traveled to Berlin to paint the Wall. Murals by Los Angeles-based artists Kent Twitchell, Farrah Karapetian, and Marie Astrid González, as well as Berlin-based artist Thierry Noir cover five segments belonging to the ‘west side’ of the original Berlin Wall. The remaining five segments preserve original graffiti painted on the Wall segments by Berlin graffiti artist Bimer, who is known for his bears. Nearly 40 feet long, the Wall Along Wilshire, is the longest stretch of the Berlin Wall outside of Germany in the world.

The Wende Museum

The Wende Museum  is an archive, a cultural center, and an art museum with exhibitions focused on the lives of those affected by the Cold War era. Founded in 2002, the Wende Museum holds an unparalleled collection of art and artifacts from the Cold War era, which serves as a foundation for programs that illuminate the political and cultural changes of the past, offer opportunities to make sense of a changing present, and inspire active participation in the personal and social changes that will shape the future. 

"The murals by Los Angeles-based artist Retna, U.K.-based artist D*Face, and Berlin-based artist duo Herakut (Falk Lehmann and Jasmin Siqquidi) cover nine segments belonging to the ‘east side’ of the original Berlin Wall – the side that faced the East German death strip and was never painted. In keeping with the Wall’s original function as an organic, ever-changing site for art happenings, these artists offer a commentary on the eroding space of the private individual operating in a public place that uses technology as an agent of social control."
- Wende Museum