WHAAM! presents a new exhibition of paintings by Charlie Ahearn, the New York artist and filmmaker behind the groundbreaking 1983 film Wild Style.

The exhibition brings together a new body of paintings that revisits Ahearn’s longstanding engagement with the visual language of Hip Hop, graffiti, comics, maps, flyers, and the streets of New York.

At the center of the exhibition is a painting of Chinese characters spelling the words “Wild Style.” Surrounding it is a constellation of smaller paintings that seem to erupt from the larger work. They can be understood as the children of the larger painting — related to their parent image, carrying its DNA, but never exactly the same.

The exhibition includes three comic-book-inspired works. One features the Devil Kids from Little Hot Stuff, bringing the comic-book characters into Ahearn’s visual language and connecting them to the underground culture and imagery of New York. The other two works draw from imagery created by the late artist Ed Piskor, including the basketball scene from Wild Style and Double Trouble in the Amphitheater. Piskor transformed these scenes into comic-book covers, which Ahearn has reinterpreted as paintings.

Another work, Tokyo Wild Style Flyer, draws from the 1983 Japanese tour. Japanese lettering across the top reads, “Hip Hop Hurricane from New York,” transforming the original tour imagery into a comic-book-like composition.

Ahearn is deeply interested in maps and has developed a distinctive practice of turning maps into paintings. Among the major works is Hip Hop Prior to 1979, a large-scale painting that charts the early geography of Hip Hop during a period that predates Ahearn’s involvement in the culture. The painting connects the pioneers of Hip Hop — from Kool Herc on the West Side, Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation on the East Side, and Grandmaster Flash in the South Bronx to Money Making Manhattan and Brooklyn’s Grandmaster Flowers.

Another map that Ahearn painted documents the Lower East Side, tracing Lee Quiñones’ murals throughout the neighborhood and creating a visual record of the area’s history, which directly includes the physical location of WHAAM! on Elizabeth Street. The Whaam! Flyer Painting is based on a tiny corner of this Lower East Side map painting, focusing on the area where WHAAM! is located and placing the gallery within the larger network of streets, places, and history that surrounds it.

Together, the works form a portrait of New York’s Hip Hop history as a living network of people, places, images, comics, murals, music, and memories. Ahearn continues to document the city from within, exploring how images evolve and take on new meaning as they move from subway trains to films, comic books to paintings, and from one generation to the next.

About Charlie Ahearn

Charlie Ahearn (b. 1951) attended the Independent Studio Program at the Whitney Museum in 1973. He is an artist filmmaker who since the 1970s has made dramatic films reflecting New York street culture such as his super8 kung fu movie The Deadly Art of Survival (1978). He was in The Times Square Show of June 1980 where he met Fred Brathwaite (Fab 5 Freddy)  and the legendary subway artist Lee Quinones which led to his directing the seminal hip hop classic Wild Style (1983).

Ahearn’s Artist Portrait videos include Martin Wong (1998), Jane in Peepland (with Jane Dickson, 1993), and a feature documentary Jamel Shabazz Street Photographer (2012). He has made a series of musical shorts such as: Bongo Barbershop (8 min., 2005) starring Grandmaster Caz (Wild Style) and Dancing Industry with The SoSoGlos on the Q train (3 min. 2014).

The filmmaker has been working as a photographer, artist, and painter all along. He made an exhibition of videos and paintings at PPOW (2017), and joined group shows such as Beyond the Streets (Los Angeles) 2018, (New York) 2019 and (London Saatchi) 2023. He showed recent paintings in the Wild Style (40) group exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch Wooster St NYC gallery in 2023. Charlie Ahearn had a solo painting exhibition at the Woodbury House Gallery in London from September 26 to October 10th, 2025.

Ahearn has lived and worked in New York City since 1973.