Magic by DabsMyla is a 2025 lithograph that playfully reimagines the visual language of vintage comic covers through a contemporary street-art lens. A cartoon magician with exaggerated features strides across a starry, black background, scattering colorful stars while carrying dripping paint buckets like props from a surreal performance. Bold outlines, saturated reds, yellows, greens, and blues, and flat graphic shapes create a lively, high-contrast composition. The typography and layout echo mid-20th-century comics, while intentional signs of wear evoke nostalgia and mass-printed ephemera. Produced in an edition of 20 and measuring 58 x 42 cm, the work reflects DabsMyla’s interest in humor, illusion, and pop culture, transforming the act of painting itself into a whimsical form of magic.
DabsMyla (Australia/USA, active since the 2000s) is a creative duo known for their vibrant, playful murals and installations. Combining bold colors and surreal imagery, their work draws inspiration from mid-century design, pop culture, and street art. Together, they transform spaces into immersive environments, merging fine art with whimsy.
Lithograph Lithography is a printing method based on the principle that water and oil do not mix. It can be used to print artwork or text onto paper or other suitable materials. Traditionally, an image was drawn with wax, fat, or oil onto a lithographic limestone surface or plate. Today, metal plates and other surfaces are also used in lithographic printing.
Magic by DabsMyla is a 2025 lithograph that playfully reimagines the visual language of vintage comic covers through a contemporary street-art lens. A cartoon magician with exaggerated features strides across a starry, black background, scattering colorful stars while carrying dripping paint buckets like props from a surreal performance. Bold outlines, saturated reds, yellows, greens, and blues, and flat graphic shapes create a lively, high-contrast composition. The typography and layout echo mid-20th-century comics, while intentional signs of wear evoke nostalgia and mass-printed ephemera. Produced in an edition of 20 and measuring 58 x 42 cm, the work reflects DabsMyla’s interest in humor, illusion, and pop culture, transforming the act of painting itself into a whimsical form of magic.
DabsMyla (Australia/USA, active since the 2000s) is a creative duo known for their vibrant, playful murals and installations. Combining bold colors and surreal imagery, their work draws inspiration from mid-century design, pop culture, and street art. Together, they transform spaces into immersive environments, merging fine art with whimsy.
It isn’t enough for us to just make a painting and be done with it. We love the challenge of placing it in context.
- DabsMyla
A mischievous flair for pop art sketches, and large scale canvases, are the trademark of DabsMyla collaborative method. They construct interactional and exuberant fixtures with their illustrations, which are influenced by street art, 1950's graphic novels and classic American animated films and movies. Their love for gastronomy and exotic journeys, transpires through their work and invigorates their prankish, unpredictably creative life together. Dabs imagines exhilarating personas which he hands over to Myla, who spatially recasts them, in her naturalistic urban landscapes. Their collaborative complementarity is so fusional, that neither of them is concerned with the idea of authorship, and they credit all their output, to their joint names. Dabs and Myla were both born in Melbourne Australia, and have been residing in Los Angeles, CA for over a decade now. They met in art school, when Dabs already was an active and prolific street artist on the Melbourne underground scene. Their collaboration has been ongoing ever since, and they live, work, and stimulate each other in an imaginative way, continuously. Their individual styles and contributions to a finished work are hard to distinguish, as the finished products always convey unwavering cohesion. Their gigantic murals and wall art, beautifully combine epigraphs, print scripts, and multiple pop and imaginary characters depictions. They bring together the vocabulary of a bygone era, with the sophisticated complexity of the multi media age. (Artist website)
Pop Art is an art movement that began in Britain in 1955 and in the late 1950s in the U.S. It challenged traditional fine arts by incorporating imagery from popular culture, such as news, advertising, and comic books. Pop Art often isolates and recontextualizes materials, combining them with unrelated elements. The movement is more about the attitudes and ideas that inspired it than the specific art itself. Pop Art is seen as a reaction against the dominant ideas of Abstract Expressionism, bringing everyday consumer culture into the realm of fine art.