JURNE

Jurne grew up in Portland, Maine and began painting graffiti in the late 90’s, adding his touch to the freight trains carrying goods through the maritime provinces of the Northeast United States.
Graffiti, in all its mystique and rawness, served as a teenage crash course in color theory, composition and art materials use; the thrill of creating bold lettering with limited resources, on the fly, often in the dark. The skills procured and seeds of inspiration sown during

these formative years of graffiti infatuation became the foundation for a two-plus-decade’s long passion-turned-art-practice, and enabled Jurne to travel extensively throughout the United States to create public work, cultivating and honing an aesthetic voice for his artwork.

Jurne’s process and the granularity of his artwork often borrow from his previous experience working as a scientist in the stem cell biology research field, before shifting to creating artwork full-time. Letterforms, gestural marks distilled from them, and their interplay with photographic elements are central themes in Jurne’s work, as is commitment to experimentation with mark-making tools and processes. Jurne’s work spans mediums, from large-scale public murals to works on canvas, hand-cut paper and wood assemblages, photography, print-making and digital design.

Over the past decade, Jurne’s artwork has been included in exhibitions and festivals domestically and abroad, including in New York, Los Angeles, Denver, Boston, and Miami, as well as Vancouver, London, Berlin, Warsaw, Napoli, Dubai U.A.E., Shenzhen, China and Auckland, New Zealand.

Jurne currently lives and works in Oakland, California.