How NYCHOS Turned Anatomical Observation into One of Street Art’s Most Recognizable Styles

Transmission 352: Interview with Nychos

NYCHOS is an internationally acclaimed illustrator, urban artist, muralist and graffiti legend who doesn’t just paint. Hailing from Austria, and raised within a traditional hunting family, NYCHOS grew up with a raw, firsthand perspective on the internal mechanics of life and death. This upbringing, combined with a deep-seated love for heavy metal, 80s cartoons, and classic graffiti, birthed his signature “Dissection” style. NYCHOS creates artwork driven by a singular energy that sits at the intersection of street culture, anatomy, and otherworldly storytelling.  As the founder of the Rabbit Eye Movement (REM), NYCHOS has spent two decades peeling back the layers of pop culture icons, wild animals, and anatomical oddities. His work serves as a masterclass in Biological Surrealism, where characters are frequently frozen mid-explosion to reveal intricate skeletal structures and translucent organs. These massive, multi-story murals are defined by a startling level of precision, maintaining medical-grade accuracy even within the chaotic, high-pressure medium of spray paint.

His artwork has undergone a Metaphysical Shift toward the “translucent” to explore the soul and the energy bodies that exist within humans. By revealing the light beneath the physical form, he turns global landscapes into bold and trippy narratives that force the viewer to look past the superficial. NYCHOS works across formats and scales without adjusting his fundamental concerns. The anatomy is always present, the precision is always there, and the question underneath the work remains consistent: what does the interior of a thing tell us that its surface cannot.Over the years, NYCHOS has exhibited internationally and built a reputation as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary urban art, bridging the gap between graffiti, fine art, and visual storytelling. His work continues to evolve, pushing the boundaries of what street art can communicate, both visually and conceptually.

Featured image: © NYCHOS THE SACRED CREATIVE 48×48 2025
Official site | Facebook | Instagram | Rabbit Eye Movement

Can you tell us a little about you? What motivated you to become an illustrator, urban artist and start making art murals? What inspired you to hit the streets?

First and foremost, I see myself as a painter. Street art and graffiti are just the worlds I operate in. My background is a bit of a clash—animal anatomy and hunting on one side, 80s cartoons on the other—but discovering spray paint as a teenager was the real turning point. The speed of the medium perfectly matched my energy. Hitting the streets to paint characters was just the natural first step, and eventually, the walls just kept growing.

Were there any non-art influences (science, horror films, comics) that pushed you toward your current style?

Absolutely. My fascination with anatomy is probably the biggest one. Seeing the networks of tissues, skeletal structures, and organs gave me this profound respect for life and how organic forms function. Combine that biological curiosity with my love for heavy metal, comics, and cartoons, and that’s where my style comes from. I didn’t come from a traditional fine-art background; I took those raw visual inputs from my youth and merged them with my graffiti roots.

By peeling back the layers of anatomy, he perfectly captures a fusion of raw heavy metal emotion and surgical, clinical precision. 

How does your mindset change when painting a massive wall compared to working on a canvas?

They are completely different beasts. When I’m out in the urban sphere, I love the spontaneity of it. A massive wall demands that you react to the scale and the environment. I’m usually sketching directly onto the surface and improvising. Canvas work, on the other hand, pulls me back into a more structured, architectural mindset. It requires more planning, digital structuring, and a different kind of focus than the raw energy of the street.

Your work is incredibly kinetic—everything looks like it’s exploding or mid-motion. Is your internal creative process just as chaotic, or do you have to be calm to organize and execute those complex layers?

It definitely looks chaotic—like an explosion of anatomy—but internally, it requires an extreme amount of calm and technical focus. The initial spark is purely emotional and kinetic; it’s an intuition, a push where I just have to dive in and let that energy out. But creating those translucent layers, the depth, and the precise cross-sections leaves very little room for error. So, while the drive is wild curiosity and raw feeling, executing it on a massive scale is highly calculated problem-solving. It’s this constant shift between acting on pure instinct and relying on deep technical discipline.

Renowned for his ‘dissections’ and ‘translucent’ techniques, NYCHOS strips away the exterior of pop culture icons. His work showcases a mastery of anatomy and urban grit, exposing the internal ‘guts and gears’ of familiar figures.

Do you think your art is more about revealing truth or creating new realities? Is there a deeper message behind the fragmentation of bodies, or is it more intuitive than conceptual?

For me, it’s about breaking surfaces and seeking the depths—asking, how deep can you go? I’m not here to create meaningless decorations or eye candy. Dissection and fragmentation are my ways of pointing out what we are and how we function as living beings. It’s intuitive because it comes from my childhood fascination, but it’s highly conceptual because it’s meant to communicate and wake people up to the literal core of our existence.

You also dissect characters that are pillars of childhood. When you’re peeling back their layers, do you feel like you’re deconstructing the character itself, or the commercialized ‘perfection’ they represent?

It’s a bit of both, but it’s done out of fascination, not disrespect. These pop culture icons shaped my imagination. By dissecting them, I’m peeling away that plastic, commercialized perfection to see what makes them “tick” underneath. It’s my way of making these fictional, untouchable characters vulnerable and organic, giving them bones and veins just like the rest of us.

He has turned the world’s walls into a giant operating table peeling back the layers of reality, literally. 

Does the public environment influence the narrative of your murals? How do you see and feel the project blend into its surrounding space? Do you have a wish list of places where you would like to go to create new murals and artworks?

The environment is everything. Street art is a visual output of people living in a system, and it belongs to the public. When I paint, I adapt the subject to the wall and the atmosphere of the city. I’ve been lucky enough to paint all over—San Francisco, Miami, Melbourne, Los Angeles, Vienna—just to name a few. I don’t necessarily have a rigid wish list; I just want to keep giving character to cities across the globe and showing people that art thrives in the public sphere.

When making a mural painting, the city became your canvas. Can you share with us any story from the backstage of one of your art project creations?

A completely different kind of backstage story comes from a recent piece I did in Linz, Austria, at Mural Harbor, called Liberation of the Soul. For a long time, my process was incredibly fast. Back in 2016, I painted a 900-square-meter piece there called The Translucent Serpent, and we finished it in just five days. It had a single protagonist and was driven by that raw, kinetic street energy.

But Liberation of the Soul broke my own record at over 1,000 square meters, and the process was radically different. Following a deep personal crisis, I stepped back from giant walls for a while and went through a period of therapy, meditation, and shamanism in Los Angeles to heal and slow down. When I finally returned to Linz in April 2024 to paint this new wall, it wasn’t a quick sprint anymore.

I spent 78 days out there, working roughly nine hours a day up in the air. Instead of just one subject, I was painting an 80-meter-long timeline of consciousness, working in overlapping layers to tell a highly personal story of pain, suffering, and spiritual awakening, inspired by traditional Mexican muralism. The physical challenge was still there, but the real backstage story of that wall was the internal shift: moving from painting fast and aggressively to spending weeks meticulously unpacking my own psyche on the side of a massive pharmaceutical warehouse.

NYCHOS is widely recognized for his unmistakable “dissection” style that reveal intricate inner worlds that are equal parts visceral and playful.

What were the biggest challenges when making murals? What about the unexpected situations during work on a mural? Do you have a nightmare painting story?

Probably the biggest challenges were broken lifts and extreme weather, from hail to boiling temperatures. With murals, unexpected situations are just part of the deal. Once firefighters had to get me down from the lift.

Street art has become more institutionalized. What do you see as the role of street art in society in the era of social media?

Street art is a vital pulse-check on society. Yes, it’s more institutionalized, and social media has changed the game by broadcasting a single wall to the entire world in seconds. But the core role hasn’t changed: it’s about making art accessible.

Photos courtesy of NYCHOS

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.