Life has been coming up roses for Michael De Feo - or flowers, anyway. The artist made his name in the 1990s by pasting thousands of prints of a solitary flower around the streets of New York, which quickly became part of the city's vast urban iconography.
Over the past 17 years, De Feo has repeated the process all over the world. He has also developed a set of raw and emotionally revealing self-portraits, which have been similarly displayed.
De Feo came upon his enduring flower image by accident while studying at New York's School Of Visual Arts. 'I was doing street art at the time, drawing with a paintbrush and creating childlike images of butterflies, flowers and kittens,' he says in his home studio in leafy New York State.
'I was tacking simple black-and-white pictures on walls. One of these images was the flower. I made a silkscreen print of it, and a few hours later I had a pile of flowers in different colours. I decided to glue them up in the city I love, among the concrete and steel. I wanted to share my work with New Yorkers.'
De Feo likes to point out that he's a street artist, not a graffiti artist. The latter work mainly with spray paint and pay much attention to text and typeface. De Feo works with images that he prints on paper and sticks on walls and buildings with paste.
New York graffiti artists introduced him to the possibilities of wall painting when he was a child, he says, but he went on to develop his own approach to street art. 'Artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat were spawned from graffiti art. We use the streets to create art in a different way.'