Harif Guzman (born 1975) is from Venezuela but lives and works in New York City. Heavily influenced from his childhood especially his father a printer and typesetter. Guzman also finds inspiration from NYC ever since first trip in the 1980’s as a young child, describing the city as his canvas.
The inspiration of his work derives from mechanical reproduction and a unique technique that refuses the deadening effects of iconographical conformity. Further inspiration is the result of Guzman’s earliest experiences of image making and the honest craft that he encountered working in his father’s print shop as a boy.  The subsequent trajectory of his path from shop worker turned street-smart skate punk, to a worldwide, well respected contemporary artist, involves an alchemical shift as humble cast-offs evolve  into fine art in his studio. 
Guzman is an artist whose work inhabits and extends a tradition established in the 1920s Weimar Republic with the extemporized collage and assemblage of Kurt Schwitters, and which he continues in contemporary America via the precedence of Robert Rauschenberg, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the early gritty Pop Art paintings of  Mike Kelley. His work is about transformation. The found materials Guzman employs are not just the physical materials he works with, but also second hand imagery and ideas that characterize contemporary urban existence.