Stik is an anonymous London street artist who began painting his signature stick figures on the streets of Hackney in the early 2000s while living in homeless shelters and social housing. The figures — six lines and two dots, the minimum necessary to constitute a human being — appeared in doorways and on the sides of buildings across east London, their spare, immediate visual language partially derived from Japanese kanji and entirely the artist's own.
The simplicity is the point. Stik has found in the most reduced possible figurative language a visual vocabulary of extraordinary emotional range — the six-line figure capable of expressing vulnerability, connection, joy, grief, and solidarity with a directness that more elaborated approaches to the human form rarely achieve. His Holding Hands series — two figures, six lines each, the gesture of connection rendered in the fewest possible marks — has become one of the most emotionally resonant images in contemporary British street art. The bronze maquette sold at Christie's for £287,500 in 2020, the proceeds funding an outdoor sculpture programme in Hackney. The 2014 mural Little Big Mother, painted on the side of a tower block in Hackney, drew direct attention to the need for social housing — the artist who had lived in that housing using his platform to advocate for those still within it.
His collectors include Elton John and Bono. His works on paper, signed prints, and limited editions have achieved six-figure prices on the secondary market. He has raised over £250,000 for charitable causes including the NHS, the Big Issue Foundation, Cardboard Citizens, and the Refugee Council.
His Holding Hands variants — in turquoise, teal, and orange — his Sleeping Baby, and his Standing Figure editions are available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.
