The artist known as Ed Bats adopted a pseudonym during their early days as a graffiti artist, covertly painting murals on streets around Aotearoa and across Europe. Perhaps as a result, Bats’ works are imbued with a certain architectural quality that is evident in both their physicality and construction.
Bats combines hard-edged abstraction with a minimalist aesthetic to create works that push at the limits of composition and form. The artist’s careful and constant working and re-working is laid bare in every stroke of paint, each exacting line or gesture. Often entire paintings are virtually obliterated, their surface painted over leaving only glimpses of the anterior colour and form beneath; similar to a graffiti wall that has been repeatedly whitewashed.
