Andrea Michaelsson is a multi-faceted artist better known by her street artist name, Btoy. She was born in 1977 in Barcelona, Spain. She studied law for four years before realizing it was not the career she wanted and began to study photography at the Institute of the Photographic Studies of Barcelona. Btoy began to paint in 2001 in the streets with her friends, with who she created paintings of different styles. Step by step Btoy developed her style.
Btoy’s work is exhibited in galleries around the world. In 2008 she has been invited by Banksy in the Cans Festival in London, along with fifty of the best stencil artists in the world. Her art works are mostly based on old photographs of prominent women, most of these women are female icons from the 1920’s-1950’s. She uses various techniques including acrylic painting, spray painting, stencil making and others. This variation of techniques led Btoy to create sensational stencil pieces. Admirable and desirable, each stencil is able to take us back in time to an iconic moment. The images appear to the viewer so dreamy, mysterious, melancholic. That’s why she prefers to place her street art and posters in textured, rusty, old places wanting to stop the time for a short moment, to invite the viewer to a dialogue with her work, to think on the fates of her figures and to remind their own volatilized dreams.