Terry Urban Living to be Lying by Your Side For Sale
Terry Urban
Living to be Lying by Your Side, 2025
Acrylic, oil, pastel, ink on canvas
60 x 48 in
About this work
Terry Urban's "Living to be Lying by Your Side" presents a luminous exploration of intimacy and longing rendered across a substantial sixty-by-forty-eight-inch canvas. The mixed-media composition layers acrylic, oil, pastel, and ink to create a richly textured surface where figures emerge and dissolve into washes of color. Urban's characteristic gestural mark-making animates the picture plane, with passages of delicate linework in ink cutting through softer, more atmospheric zones built up through pastel and oil. The palette shifts between moments of warmth and cooler, more contemplative tones, suggesting the emotional complexity embedded in the work's evocative title. There is a vulnerability present here, a sense of bodies and psyches intertwined yet somehow separate, reaching toward connection. Urban captures that particular ache of presence and absence that defines our most profound relationships. The scale of the work draws viewers into this emotional landscape, demanding a physical engagement that mirrors the intimacy of its subject matter. Within Urban's broader practice, this piece demonstrates his continued investigation of human connection and the ways we construct meaning through closeness to others. His facility with multiple media allows for a visual language that feels simultaneously spontaneous and considered, raw yet refined. The work sits comfortably within contemporary figurative traditions while maintaining a distinctly personal voice that has garnered attention from collectors and institutions alike. For inquiries regarding the acquisition of "Living to be Lying by Your Side," interested collectors are encouraged to contact Guy Hepner gallery directly.
Price on Application
Edition & Provenance
- Year
- 2025
- Medium
- Acrylic, oil, pastel, ink on canvas

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About Terry Urban
Terry Urban was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and moved to San Diego after high school to pursue skateboarding, where he was first introduced to turntablism. He returned to Cleveland to work as a DJ, later landing a role at Sirius Satellite Radio, before relocating to New York City in 2006 to focus on music full time. He built a career producing mixtapes, including Viva la Hova, Southerngold, and Biggie Stardust, earning recognition from artists including Jay-Z, Coldplay, and Drake.
In 2015, after more than a decade in the music industry, Urban returned to painting, treating it as a new creative outlet and eventually a full-time practice. His work is bold and gestural, combining vibrant color with symbolic, often somber imagery, including skulls, bones, and fragmented figures that speak to mortality, resilience, and inner conflict. Despite the weight of his subject matter, his paintings carry an underlying sense of energy and momentum, shaped by the same restless drive that carried him through skateboarding and music.
Urban brings a disciplined, almost ritualistic approach to his studio practice, working extended painting sessions often set against music or film. His path from street culture to music to visual art has become part of his artistic identity, and his work resonates as a document of reinvention as much as a body of paintings.
Guy Hepner works with collectors seeking Terry Urban's bold, symbolic paintings shaped by his path through music and street culture. Contact us to discuss available inventory or to inquire about upcoming releases.
