They are one of the most rare of collectives, or crews, as they have been known since their early graffiti days in Haifa, Israel in the early 2000s. Broken Fingaz collaborate and create as individuals, from their almost sign-painted, comic cell-style murals to their lush, minimal still lifes, and there is something in their works that has a sense of confirming life. Or, better yet, a sense of creating work that channels the rebellious, raucous nature of graffiti into something that becomes sublime and almost fantasy. Even the cover image, where a woman poses intimately with a skeleton, possesses the energy of being on the edge of existence but also qualities of dreams and daring imagination.
The BFC Book feels long overdue as a monograph, because there is an enormous amount of ground to cover over the course of a few decades while flipping through the pages. There’s graffiti, murals, screenprints, installations, paintings, photography, and storytelling about how this Israeli collective began to see their vision grow. Emanating from the pages is something quite historic and essential, a chronicle of how a particular era of outsider and graffiti art began to evolve and take shape into something completely new. We take for granted how art born on the streets has detonated into the contemporary art world, but The BFC Book is funny, it’s political, it’s vandalism—and then it’s a series of woodblock prints, everything art can be with the smarts that don't confine it to anything singular. As Humphrey Ocean says in the book’s foreword, “The art I love most is unpreventable.” —Evan Pricco
Broken Fingaz, fingazstudio.com
