Critical Review
Beggar is a signed woodcut, released in 2009 as an edition of 25, depicting a stickman sitting on the ground.
Beggar is a rare depiction of a stickman sitting. The figure, sitting on the ground, looks up with one arm outstretched in this spray-painted wooden cut-out, signed in black felt-tip pen.
The title and subject matter of Beggar attests to the committed social consciousness which is a dominant thread through the artist’s work. Himself homeless in East London in the early days of his art career, Stik has made it his mission to draw attention to the plight of the homeless. He has noted that the way in which his stickmen lack mouths underlines the voicelessness of the homeless in urban society despite their visibility on the streets. Much like The Big Issue, Beggar evinces the artist’s solidarity with the urban dispossessed.
Beggar is somewhat unique in terms of medium in Stik’s oeuvre as one of his few commercially available woodcuts by Stik, alongside Onbu. While experimentation is never far from Stik’s practice (his exhibition Walk includes a piece made out of a traffic light), this woodcut is a rare find in a collection dominated by screen prints.
