AMSTERDAM.- From September 27th through January 18th, 2026, the STRAAT Museum will be presenting FAILE: Between the Sheets. This Brooklyn-based artistic duo, consisting of Patrick McNeil (1975) and Patrick Miller (1976), was formed 25 years ago and is internationally acclaimed for their mixed-media practice. Between the Sheets, FAILE’s first major museum showing in the Netherlands, reflects on the early years working in the street and the enduring influence of those experiences on their studio practice. From early stencil campaigns and wheatpasted posters to monoprints, handmade prints, and site-responsive installations, the show draws a throughline between past interventions and new work. The installation of a new work consisting of three monumental fabric columns will be an eye-catching addition to the ever-growing STRAAT collection.
Globally recognized and institutionally collected, FAILE has been a defining force in street art since the early 2000s. Their work has appeared in major solo and group exhibitions at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, Tate Modern, and Dallas Contemporary. They’ve created installations for the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center, transformed Times Square, and shown with a range of galleries internationally, contributing to the global dialogue around street and contemporary art. Their distinct visual language, layered, symbolic, and rooted in printmaking and collage, has helped shape the evolution of contemporary street art. While FAILE’s work often incorporates punchy slogans and evocative phrases, it resists singular meaning, inviting interpretation through layers of emotional, personal, and cultural resonance. Emerging at the turn of the millennium from the same urban environments that fostered graffiti culture, FAILE introduced a fresh visual language, illicit and poetic, reflective and accessible. Their work draws on the emotional power of storytelling, the familiarity of visual culture pulled from forgotten corners, like old skateboard magazines, matchbooks, and zines, mixing punk immediacy with painterly craft and symbolic depth.
New Work for the Permanent Collection
The exhibition at STRAAT celebrates FAILE’s inclusion in the permanent collection with a striking new piece: three monumental fabric columns suspended from the museum’s ceiling, occupying a central space within STRAAT’s main hall. Towering and textural, the work is both architectural and ephemeral, a continuation of FAILE’s evolving conversation with material, sacred imagery, and public space. Echoing earlier installations in the US, the columns respond to the architecture of space while referencing sacred forms and monumental objects, serving as a point of dialogue within the expansive street art environment that surrounds them.
Range of New and Archival Work
The exhibition features a range of new and archival work, original prints, and graphic compositions on paper and fabric that echo FAILE’s early street interventions. Together, they reaffirm the duo’s belief in public dialogue, viewer agency, and the enduring power of visual culture to interrupt, inspire, and connect. Building on recent experiments with textile, their series of large-scale fabric columns and quilts translates these ideas into a new material language. Through fabric, stitching, and scale, the columns extend FAILE’s visual vocabulary into a tactile and architectural space, echoing the spirit of their early street interventions while embracing a new form of assembly. All works in the exhibition are for sale.
Between the Sheets
The exhibition’s title, Between the Sheets, directly references prints and underscores FAILE’s origins in printmaking, a practice first shaped through early interventions in the streets with handmade posters and stencils.From those first interventions, their approach to layering, remixing, and recontextualizing imagery became a way of engaging in a broader visual dialogue with the city, shaped by a process of building, peeling, and revealing meaning over time. The title also reflects the conceptual “in-between” spaces their work often inhabits, between authorship and collaboration, high and low culture, nostalgia and critique.
