Cody Bayne is a Los Angeles–based multidisciplinary artist whose work excavates the layered histories, coded identities, and fleeting moments embedded in the city’s urban surfaces.For more than a decade, Bayne has transformed the overlooked materials of Los Angeles—faded posters, detritus from construction sites, fragments of signage, discarded tape, concrete rubbings, and the residue of public life—into a visual language that is both deeply personal and profoundly connected to place. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee and based in Los Angeles for over twenty years, Bayne has spent much of that time walking the city, and neighborhoods, observing the small shifts, scars, and stories embedded in its walls and pavement. These walks, which began as a recovery practice after a life-altering accident in 2012, evolved into a long-term method of observation, harvesting, and creative inquiry central to his process. Bayne’s work is animated by the concept of “materials as witness”—the idea that the urban fragments incorporated into his work carry memory, emotion, and the imprint of lived experience. Treating the street as both collaborator and archive, Bayne integrates these found elements with paint, ink, tape, and letterpress posters, using concrete and gel mediums to embed language, obscure meaning, and create palpable surfaces that mirror the city’s worn, layered, and continually renewed identity. This approach led Bayne to coin the terms Neo-Urban Expressionism and Urban Informalism to describe a practice that merges the immediacy of expressionism with the rawness and unpredictability of materials sourced directly from the city environment. Across major bodies of work—including Disparate Renewal, Bedtime Stories and Other Mythologies, Elegy of the Last Republic, Weather Is Here Wish You Were Beautiful, and most recently The Spots Project—Bayne navigates themes of impermanence, collective memory, personal vulnerability, and the charged relationship between text, abstraction, and environment. His work often oscillates between the “hard” exterior of the city and the emotional, intimate reflections embedded within it, requiring viewers to engage closely with the surface to decipher language, gesture, and intention. Bayne sees this act of looking—slow, attentive, open—as essential to the experience of the work. Bayne has exhibited widely across Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, Palm Springs, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Santa Monica, and Switzerland. His work has been featured in CC Magazine, Bold Journey, VoyageLA, and other publications, and he was recognized as a Rising Star by Saatchi Art in 2016. Guided by an ethic of presence, observation, and material truth, Cody Bayne creates work that preserves the ephemeral, reframes the forgotten, and transforms the city’s discarded language into a form of visual testimony. His practice stands as an ongoing meditation on what it means to move through a city—its past, its fractures, its resilience—and to translate those encounters into works that invite contemplation, presence, and recognition."