SHOCK UC MSK
(b. Midwest, USA — lives and works between Minneapolis and everywhere else)
SHOCK UC MSK is a painter, sculptor, and multidisciplinary artist whose practice emerges from the lineage of graffiti writing, reimagined for the present moment. A member of the legendary MSK crew, Shock has spent the past two decades building a body of work rooted in movement, adaptation, and raw creative force.
Born in the Midwest and raised between cityscapes, Shock’s early education came from walls, rooftops, freight yards, and underground publications. He developed a reputation not just for his distinctive visual style, but for his relentless work ethic and commitment to the evolution of the form. His current practice spans painting, sculpture, video, printmaking, sound, installation, design, and performance.
At the core of his work is a deep relationship with surface, material, and site. Shock constructs his paintings on salvaged industrial objects—metal panels, electrical boxes, HVAC ducting—sourced from abandoned warehouses, grain silos, and factory ruins across the country. These objects arrive with their own histories, and through layers of paint, gesture, and mark-making, Shock transforms them into charged visual fields. His large-scale installations, often created collaboratively in vacant or transitional spaces, serve as portals—temporary, mythic, and unforgettable.
Shock’s work navigates the space between personal myth and public language. Equally informed by graffiti’s coded systems and painting’s formal concerns, his work refuses categorization. Whether abstract or figurative, still or moving, it remains unmistakably his: layered, immediate, and emotionally precise.
A respected figure in both underground and institutional spaces, Shock has exhibited nationally and continues to produce ambitious projects across disciplines. His work resists convention, favors intuition, and reflects the world back to us—unfiltered, layered, and alive.