Hijack b. 1992, Los Angeles

Hijack is a Los Angeles–based contemporary artist whose practice bridges the raw energy of street art with the technical precision and narrative depth of fine painting. Working primarily in oil, acrylic, and spray paint on woodcut panels, marble, salvaged wood, canvas, and reclaimed metal street signage, he creates works that range from intimate studio pieces to large-scale dual-panel compositions and hand-painted sculptures that push against the physical limits of the frame.

Born Jacques Guetta in 1992 and raised in an intensely creative household as the son of the artist known as Mr. Brainwash, Hijack came of age with a spray can in hand. As a teenager he worked the walls of Los Angeles under the cover of night, developing a distinctive visual language built around anonymous black silhouettes, sharp irony, and slogans such as “You’re Never Too Young to Dream Big.” His early street interventions-placed in high-traffic corridors from Melrose Avenue to Runyon Canyon - established a voice that combined dark humor with pointed social observation.

Over the past decade Hijack has deliberately expanded beyond stencil and spray. He pursued classical training in oil painting and now works with the patience and control of a realist while retaining the immediacy and subversive edge of the street. His subjects frequently draw from leisure and popular culture - surfers, skiers, golfers, equestrians, kayakers - yet these scenes are often fractured or doubled, joining two distinct moments into a single continuous image. In parallel, he lifts figures from the Western art-historical canon and relocates them in the present: Van Gogh offering sunflowers across a tenement gap, the Mona Lisa at the wheel of a speedboat, Monet’s crowd filling the stands of a contemporary tennis match. The effect is neither parody nor quotation; it is a temporal displacement that allows nineteenth-century figures to inhabit a world they were never painted into.

Contessa Gallery presented a sold-out solo booth of Hijack’s work during Art Basel Week in 2024 and, in 2025, placed the most expensive work of his career. His paintings and sculptures are held in private collections across the United States and internationally. He continues to live and work in Los Angeles, refining a practice that refuses easy categorization - at once street-born and studio-honed, playful and exacting, contemporary and deeply in conversation with the past.