“Being able to continue living, having fun.” —Stumpo

Niko Stumpo was born 1976 in Drammen, Norway. He grew up in the ice lands of Norway, and at the age 6 he moved to Italy, and began vigorously skateboarding. During many years, skateboarding became his life. He had become a pro skater and toured around Europe with his sponsors. The fun stopped when he had a severe injury, and was forced to change his career to another focus, which led to “art.” He had finished High School in the field of art, and later enrolled in a Fine Art Academy, however never completed the actual course. Even though, he had a great passion in art and could see the great potential of it — through his own creativity. Instead of continuing school, he became fascinated with Web design, and one of his early inspirations on the World Wide Web was an animated butterfly on the first edition, “The Remedi Project.” Since then, he has contributed to “The Remedi Project;” he has worked as a creative director at Quam, a major design agency in Milan, Italy, including work for clients such as MTV, Peugeot, L'Oreal, and Condé Nast; and presently, he works as a freelancer.

With all his commercial work, he has still dedicated time to personal artwork, which has become widely known around the globe. Much has been showcased on his experimental site abnormalbehaviorchild.com (aka ABC), a site built in one night from midnight to five in the morning. His unique abstract cartoon-like drawings are difficult to describe in a few words, since they are different and unusual in form (somewhat like alien characters). Also, these characters have emerged from his childhood, as Niko loved sketching cartoons — small-animated puppets that have become the trademark to his paintings and digital art. Today, he has given “magical life” to many of the characters with the use of new technologies (e.g. Flash). Consequently, his artwork has been exhibited at the Biennial in Tirana and Valencia, the World Wide Web Exhibition in Sao Paolo, Brazil, the George Pompidou in Paris.

Niko once commented on an interview how he would like to be remembered; he responded, “As a good guy, like ‘do you remember Niko?’...‘Oooh yes! He was a good guy!’” In his young career, he has been a professional skater, and currently is a successful artist and highly acclaimed Web designer, but above all, he is in fact “a good guy.”