Geisha & The Swan

Virtu has specialized in Pop Art, Pin Up, Contemporary, Animation, Illustration, Comic Book & Music Venue Artworks thru the 80′s and early 90′s, leading up to a complete focus on Pop Surrealism & Alternative Contemporary Art. Virtu Gallery opened it’s first retail space in 1998 but had already been a consistent presence in the L.A. Lowbrow & Pop Surrealist Art World since the late 80′s. Born in Los Angeles in 1978, Tristan began pursuing street art as a teenager, painting everything from walls to billboards in the urban landscape wherever he lived, including London, Detroit and Brooklyn. After growing up on comic books, graffiti and skateboard culture, Tristan designed his first toy for Fisher Price at 18 years old and began working as an artist full-time. He has since become a driving force in the world of ‘Art Toys’, designing the Dunny and Munny figures for Kidrobot. Shortly after studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Tristan founded Thunderdog Studios, of which he was the President and Creative Director for 10 years. Thunderdog Studios regularly designs and consults for clients such as Nike, Disney and Barack Obama on projects that span the globe across all mediums. In 2012, Tristan moved back to his childhood home of Los Angeles to pursue his paintings and large scale mural projects full-time. Tristan’s work can be seen in galleries around the world and in the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.