Who

One of the hottest artists on the contemporary scene, the heavily-tattooed Violette is known for his paintings and sculptures riffing on murder and teenage suicide.

Backstory

Violette grew up in Ithaca, and its grim, wintry landscape clearly shaped his taste for the moody and macabre. As a youngster, he got into crystal meth and dropped out of high school, later working as a tattoo artist while earning his G.E.D. Hoping to make a career out of more highbrow art, Violette went to art school, briefly attending SVA before finally graduating from Columbia University's MFA program in 2000. Like Ryan McGinley and Dash Snow, Violette hit the big time by drawing inspiration from the darker side of youth culture. Inspired by hardcore Norwegian heavy metal music, and working with a palette of glossy black and crystalline white, he's been compared by Times critic Roberta Smith to the "Three R's of darkness: Robert Smithson, Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Prince." In 2005, Violette had a solo show at the Whitney and was in P.S. 1's "Greater New York" show. He's represented by Jose Freire's Team Gallery.

Of note

Violette is something of a showman when it comes to his exhibitions, and he carefully choreographs music to accent his sculptures. His piece for the 2005 Whitney Biennial consisted of a small-scale replica of a burned-out church, its skeleton coated in salt and mounted on a glassy black platform. The soundtrack for the show was composed by a heavy metal musician who'd previously been convicted for ritually murdering a member of a rival band. Violette's 2006 London show featured a band whose lead singer performed from inside a sealed coffin, and the volume of the music caused cracks to form in the gallery's ceiling and light bulbs to burst.

For the record

In 2006, his work "Untitled (Scoreboard)," a huge, glossy black plaque supported by steel pipes, sold for $117,600 at a Phillips de Pury. A big fan of Violette's hyper-dramatic work is Stavros Merjos, a Hollywood producer/art collector.

The look

Among his many other tattoos, Violette has a huge spider web on his neck.

Personal

Violette is married to writer Alissa Bennett, who's written monologues for the performers in artist Sue de Beer's video installations. They live in a loft in Williamsburg. Violette's studio is in Long Island City.