Spray cans fill the ammo slots in PRIEST's Doom repaint

In the painting that went around in August, the opening courtyard of Doom has been carefully re-tooled. The marine's hands now hold a marker and a red fire extinguisher. Up on the wall where the demons should be arriving, the artist's own name drips twice in blackletter tag: PRIEST.

PRIEST is a New Zealand-born, London-based artist who came up writing graffiti and stayed self-taught; KAWS spotted the work and the galleries followed. Trapped in a Cel at Mucciaccia in 2023 ran cartoon and game imagery through satire, and “PAPER CUT” at Saatchi Gallery this past winter built oversized craft-material dioramas about phone theft and knife crime. The Doom canvas reached us the way it reached 4,300 other people, reposted by the curation account itsnotgallery under a one-word caption.

The prints in PRIEST’s own shop extend the series. SPEEDRUN puts a timer and a CAN: 100% readout over a sprint through a train tunnel, bombing reframed as the purest speedrun. NPC stages a GoldenEye 007-style hostage scene in a tagged bathroom stall. Armor 0% is the honest detail: a writer mid-run has full health and no protection at all.

Back in 2012 Killscreen asked why games embraced graffiti, when the traffic ran the other way, spray paint as set dressing. Fourteen years on, PRIEST reverses the flow and treats the game itself as the wall.