Francis Schuck

I was born in 1971 and raised in Queens, New York, in a family that valued work, humor, and creative survival. As a teenager, I found my first voice in graffiti, painting walls and writing in the LIRR yards and Long Island City before I knew what a gallery was. That early work, unsanctioned and immediate, taught me everything about gesture, presence, and urgency.

I studied at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan and was lucky to attend Cooper Union's Saturday Program, which led to scholarships and opportunities abroad. I studied art history and painting in Vienna, and later in the UK, where I began weaving theory into my practice and learning how material, memory, and critique could coexist in a single piece.

Over the last 35 years, I've worked between abstraction and narrative figuration. I'm drawn to repurposed materials: discarded drawings, linens, thread, pigment, things that carry a history, even stained or broken. My work often lives in cultural memory and critique: how we market innocence, brand identity, and mistake nostalgia for truth.

I've shown work at Fogue Gallery in Seattle, Domicile Gallery in Seattle, the Seattle Convention Center, and Roadrunner Relics in Austin, TX, and collaborated with Dinos Chapman on a 2023 site-specific installation called Mistakes Made, Nothing Learned. 

I'm still building the language I started on train cars all those years ago. Except now, instead of spray paint, I work with scratching, stitches, and the soft weight of paper and discarded bed linens.