Sten Lex is a duo of artists from Rome and Taranto in Italy who have been working together since 2000. Considered as the pioneers of urban stencil art in Italy, their work is mostly the product of individual pathways. As a mixture of stencil and pop art, Sten Lex’s monumental works are made from thousands of strips of paper and compose portraits of people that both artists have photographed themselves. The subjects for their artwork are found among family albums or are merely anonymous people. They practice a specific type of street art, referred to as “Stencil Posters”, which combines two main techniques of wheat-pasting and stencilling. They started with this technique back in 2009, where a stencil cut on paper is glued on the wall, and then painted on to rework the matrix. The scraps become part of the work itself, and continues to become worn out over time.
Every now and then they change their work spectrum by approach a new theme. Diving completely into the abstractness of geometry, playing with optical illusions, or working around a self-created subject that comes and goes whenever walls present themselves.