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Alex Binnie is a British artist whose work has played an important role in the development of contemporary tattooing, while extending far beyond the tattoo into printmaking, drawing, painting and sculpture.

Since the 1980s, Binnie has occupied a distinctive position between the underground and the contemporary art world. His career began in Fine Art and performance, alongside experimental music and the alternative cultural scenes of the period. He studied Fine Art in Wales, graduating in 1982, and became involved in experimental performance and music, including the groups Pure and Zos Kia. These early experiences established an enduring interest in the body, identity, ritual and the relationship between art and everyday life.

Binnie began tattooing in London in the late 1980s. In 1991 he travelled to Los Angeles, where he encountered a vibrant and rapidly developing tattoo culture, working alongside influential artists and developing connections within the worlds of body modification and performance art. His relationship with the American performance artist Ron Athey was particularly significant, bringing tattooing into direct dialogue with performance, the body and questions of identity and transformation.

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In 1993 Binnie returned to London and founded Into You in Clerkenwell with piercer Teena Marie. Over the next two decades, Into You became one of the most influential tattoo studios in Britain. More than simply a tattoo studio, it became a creative environment in which artists could develop individual approaches to the medium. Artists including Curly, Xed Le Head, Duncan X, Tomas Tomas and Thomas Hooper were associated with the studio, helping to establish London as an international centre for innovative and contemporary tattooing.

Binnie's own tattoo practice draws on diverse visual traditions, including Japanese tattooing, American traditional tattooing and tribal forms. His work is characterised by strong line, pattern and an acute understanding of the relationship between image and the human body. For Binnie, tattooing is not simply an image applied to the skin; it is an artwork that exists through the body and changes with it.

His interest in printmaking provides another dimension to this practice. Binnie has explored screenprinting, woodcut, etching and linocut, drawing particular inspiration from the historical relationship between Japanese woodblock prints and tattooing. His series of woodcut portraits of people from the tattoo community transforms an ephemeral underground culture into a permanent visual record.

Binnie's work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Royal Academy, the Drawing Center in New York, Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, Somerset House, the Museum of London and the National Maritime Museum Cornwall. His practice has consequently become part of a wider recognition of tattooing as an important form of contemporary visual culture.

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The Whistleblower Gallery is pleased to continue its longstanding relationship with Alex Binnie testing boundaries. Binnie's work reminds us that those boundaries between fine art, craft, popular culture and the body are not fixed.