Street Artist in the Spotlight: HOXXOH
Miami-based artist Douglas Hoekzema, known as HOXXOH, creates hypnotic abstract works built around time, rhythm, sacred geometry and the forces that shape movement. Emerging from Miami’s graffiti culture and later studying architecture, art history and painting, he has developed a visual language in which concentric lines, saturated colour and repeating patterns appear to pulse across walls and canvases.
At the centre of HOXXOH’s practice is a fascination with the tension between control and unpredictability. Rather than simply painting an image, he often designs tools and systems that allow gravity, pressure, repetition and motion to influence the finished work. The result is abstraction that can feel meticulously engineered and unexpectedly organic at the same time.
Portals, Time and Movement
HOXXOH’s Portal Murals are among his most recognisable works. Layered bands of colour radiate across architecture in rhythmic sequences, creating the sensation of depth and movement on an otherwise static surface.
The idea of the portal is both visual and conceptual. Repetition draws the eye towards an imagined centre, while colour and geometry encourage the viewer to experience the wall as a threshold rather than a flat plane. Light and shadow alter the composition throughout the day, making the surrounding architecture part of the work.
This interest in cycles reflects HOXXOH’s wider fascination with time and natural systems, where repetition rarely produces exactly the same outcome twice.
Inventing New Ways to Paint
Experimentation runs throughout HOXXOH’s mural practice. His Portal, RainBird and Transfer series each begin with a different way of allowing movement to shape paint.
For the RainBird Murals, he adapted irrigation equipment and pressurised systems to propel paint across enormous surfaces in sweeping arcs. His Transfer Murals developed from experiments using something as ordinary as a dustpan, dragging and transferring paint to create distortions that could later be enlarged onto architecture.
Accidents and imperfections are not necessarily corrected. They become part of the composition, allowing HOXXOH to work in the space between a predetermined system and whatever happens once that system is set in motion.
From Miami Walls to the Studio
The same questions continue inside HOXXOH’s studio, where his practice has developed into several distinct bodies of work.
GraffitiStreet explored these in Inside the Studio: The Five Pillars of HOXXOH’s Practice, spanning Aerosol, Gravity Mapping, Pendulum, Selfless Portrait and Transfer works. Each approaches abstraction differently, from oscillating pendulums that allow gravity to draw across the surface to compositions inspired by the invisible gravitational forces governing celestial movement.
What connects them is process. Movement becomes a mark, gravity becomes a collaborator and repetition becomes a way of recording time.
For GraffitiStreet’s Urban Equinox exhibition in 2026, HOXXOH brought this language into the gallery through works including Yellow Portal and Blue Portal, distilling the immersive energy of his public murals into a more intimate scale.
Miami, Architecture and Monumental Abstraction
HOXXOH’s relationship with Miami remains fundamental to his work. The city’s graffiti culture, architecture, changing light and constant movement have all informed a practice that now extends internationally.
In 2022, his 14,000-square-foot mural for Arlo Wynwood transformed the hotel’s nine-storey exterior into a monumental field of flowing colour. The composition originated in a smaller studio work before being expanded across the architecture, demonstrating how readily HOXXOH moves between canvas and city scale.
More recently, HOXXOH’s mural for Oolite Arts in Little River covered warehouse buildings scheduled for redevelopment, introducing another idea central to his practice: time itself as part of the artwork. The mural exists within a moment of transition, transforming architecture precisely because that architecture will not remain unchanged forever.
Related Reading: HOXXOH
Explore the mechanics behind his public work in HOXXOH Murals: Portals, RainBird and Transfer Series Explained, where GraffitiStreet looks at the unconventional tools, engineered systems and processes behind three major strands of his mural practice.
Inside the Studio: The Five Pillars of HOXXOH’s Practice moves away from the monumental walls to explore Aerosol, Gravity Mapping, Pendulum, Selfless Portrait and Transfer, revealing how his experimentation continues at studio scale.
In HOXXOH at Arlo Wynwood Miami, we explore the vast 14,000-square-foot mural that transformed a nine-storey façade into one of his most ambitious architectural interventions.
HOXXOH at Oolite Arts: A Monumental Prelude to Little River follows his practice back to Miami, where a temporary warehouse mural became part of a wider story about transformation, impermanence and the changing city.
More Artists in the Spotlight
For another artist whose roots in graffiti developed into a language of abstraction, explore Futura, whose pioneering approach helped push graffiti beyond lettering towards gesture, atmosphere and abstraction. Discover Spidertag for a different exploration of geometry, rhythm and urban space through light, or Joachim, whose energetic paintings embrace colour, gesture and spontaneity.
Discover HOXXOH at GraffitiStreet
GraffitiStreet presents HOXXOH across original studio works and exhibitions, including his Portal works shown in Urban Equinox, bringing the movement, colour and geometry of his monumental public practice into the gallery.
Explore HOXXOH at GraffitiStreet to discover currently available works, or contact GraffitiStreet for acquisitions, sourcing, mural enquiries and private viewings.
Visit GraffitiStreet Gallery, 25A West Street, Chichester, West Sussex, England PO19 1QW.
Image copyright HOXXOH