![]() ![]() His first work was for industrial supergroup Pigface for their April 15 gig with Silverfish at Cannibal Club: a sinister riff on the poster for Japanese psychedelic horror Goke: Body Snatcher From Hell. That was in 1991: Kozik was sharing studio space with legendary Austin poster artists like Micael Priest and Guy Juke when a California-based art cartel paid to set up a silkscreen press for Kozik. ![]() It was all Xerox stuff, but his stuff was wild, and it just got wilder when he moved into the silk screen stuff." Stegall said, "When he was the doorman at the Cannibal Club, that was the first anyone realized this guy was an artist. ![]() Kozik became a fixture at Club Foot, which he described as a mixture of "gays, New Wave people, leftover Cosmic Cowboy guys, these weird punk people." Eager to be part of the scene but musically incompetent ("I tried, I sucked,” he told the Chronicle in a 2013 email) and with the patronage of booker and club owner Brad First, he started making hand-bills for local acts like the Butthole Surfers and Scratch Acid. He soon dropped out of high school, signed up for the USAF, and dropped into the middle of Austin's burgeoning alternative and punk scene when he was stationed at Bergstrom Air Force Base (now the city's airport). His mother came from Spanish aristocracy, his father was a US serviceman, and in 1976 this military brat was relocated to California. "It was a fascist country," he told future Chronicle music editor Raoul Hernandez in 1997, and fascist symbolism became a part of his later art – thoroughly satirized and lampooned in bawdy fashion, a melding of the high-minded collages of Dead Kennedys go-to artist Winston Smith and underground 80s sleaze comix like Cherry Poptart. Kozik was born in Madrid, Spain in 1962 during the Franco regime. founder Tim Doyle said, "It made hand-made art something you could afford, because it was screenprinted, not one-offs." Kozik didn't invent the gig poster, nor was he the first Austin artist to make their reputation from them, but he was the instigator of a movement in the early 1990s that resurrected it – both visually and as a commercial enterprise. The Offspring vocalist Dexter Holland (the band having hired Kozik to create the sleeve for their 1998 album, Americana) described his style as "very glossy, innocent and 1950s, but with a twisted aspect." Kozik was arguably the defining artist of '90s punk/indie/alt rock poster and cover art, his sleazoid sensibilities luring unwitting audiences into waves of noise and delicious depravity. Chronicle writer and punk historian Tim Stegall called him "the graphic and aesthetic conscience of our generation," and that conscience will forever be associated with Austin. When Frank Kozik passed away this week at the age of 61, he was remembered as the founding father of the modern art print scene. Signs of the time: A selection of Frank Kozik's work from his years as the go-to poster artist for the rising underground scene. ![]()
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