DALEK, born James Marshall, is an American painter known for his Space Monkey character. First painted on a wall in Connecticut in 1995, Space Monkey grew out of Marshall's love of Japanese pop culture, punk rock and street art, and became his creative alter ego. Marshall maintains the character is not a monkey but “a mouse”, his image of a human lost in a growing sea of technology and convenience.
Marshall was born to a military family in New London, Connecticut, and moved frequently as a child, finishing high school in Japan before returning to the United States. He earned a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1992 and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995. With early support from the artist Shepard Fairey, he produced stickers and prints that helped establish the character before he moved to Brooklyn in 2001. In Brooklyn he began an apprenticeship with the painter Takashi Murakami after seeing Murakami's work at a Boston museum show, which shaped his studio practice and color mixing.
