“It was the very first time that I painted on a rooftop!,” says French-Swiss land artists Saype. It was so amazing.”
In a project commissioned for the “Urbain.es” exhibition curated by Magda Danysz, the large scale sprayer appears to be following a thread in Le Parc Barbieux in the south of France. “It was a beautiful opportunity to create an artwork and to create link between people there,” he says.
Located in one of France’s youngest and poorest regions, the city of Roubaix also is called home by a mix of immigrant populations from the global south who integrated into a vastly different culture than the one from which they came. Street Artist YZ has made women from these cultures the center stage of her large wheat-pasted portraits for about a decade, and we have published her campaigns of solid pillars of their communities several times.
In recognition of her participation in the women-centered exhibition URBAIN.ES here, curated by Magda Danysz, YZ says she conducted interviews of her subjects from Kabul, Vietnam, Tunisia, Cameron, and the Ivory Coast before creating their large-scale portraits. She says she considers her work as that of a documentarian. She says it’s a complex mix of conforming to the new culture and desiring to honor the traditions and habits of the old one. What has she learned, aside from the immigrant stereotypes of Roubaix that outsiders sometimes have about them?
“This is of particular importance when questioning identity issues in a country where the insistence on integration often prioritizes the cultural ‘smoothing’ over cultural identity,” she says.
Here are a few selections from YZ’s installations from her ongoing project “Empress,” which “explores the cultural diversity of different communities throughout the world, questioning ideas of consumerism and conformity.”
Click HERE to read our previous article about this exhibition.
YZ and Her ‘Amazone’ Warrior Women On Senegalese Walls – Harrington and Rojo on Huffington Post
YZ Yseult “Empress” Brings More Strong Female Images to the Street
URBAIN.ES
Exposition collective sous le commissariat de Magda Danysz
Group Show curated by Magda Danysz
Du 31 mars au 24 Juillet 2022
From March 31st to July 24th, 2022
Click HERE for more information and a complete preview of the artworks.
La Condition Publique, Roubaix, France
More about Roubaix: The Banlieue Project
In addition to addressing a common narrative, thematically curated group shows can draw attention to contrasts in style and present something that unified to the visitor. A new women-centered project opening at the end of the month in Roubaix, France, aims to draw similarities and differences among a variety of street artists to create a dialogue about how women are depicted in public space.
Using new and borrowed art pieces, curator and art dealer Magda Dansyz fills a 15,000 square foot exhibition space at La Condition Publique, a culture factory that inhabits an historic former wool and cotton processing facility and is now a venue for artistic creation. “I have been working for a year now about the place and representation of women in the public space through the light of street art practices,” she says about Urbain.es and the nearly 30 artists whose work is here.
They span perhaps 40 years of street practice from risk-taking activists to self-promoters leveraging activism as a brand builder, to more subtle artworks in the public sphere that raise incisive questions about perceptions of women in society.
“In a variety of forms, the exhibition presents in situ works, original art pieces lent by the artists or private and public collections, as well as documentary testimonials retracing historical urban performances,” says a text from the organizers. Exciting highlights include the inclusion of works by true old-school billboard activists like the Guerrilla Girls who for decades have been confronting art institutions for systemic sexism, the 1970/80s NY graff writer Lady Pink who painted trains in a male dominated subculture, and Yseult YZ Digan, whose painterly depictions of women represent a quieter tribute to the strength and steel of women that appears through many cultures, often overlooked.
Artistes I Artists
Yseult YZ Digan, eL Seed, Guerilla Girls, Maya Hayuk, Icy and Sot, Invader, Mark Jenkins et Sandra Fernandez, JR, Kubra Khademi, Lady Pink, Madame, Miss.Tic, Miss Van, Mode 2, Robert Montgomery, Eko Nugroho, Obvious, Quik, Edmond Marie Rouffet, Magda Sayeg, Saype, Swoon, T-Kid, Aya Tarek, Amalia Ulman, Zevs
URBAIN.ES
Exposition collective sous le commissariat de Magda Danysz
Group Show curated by Magda Danysz
Du 31 mars au 24 juillet 2022
From March 31st to July 24th, 2022
Click HERE for more information and a complete preview of the artworks.
La Condition Publique, Roubaix, France
RSVP: laconditionpublique.com
Human rights, unjust imprisonment, women’s equality, the plight of migrants and, the threats of climate change. The many pitfalls of unbridled capitalism.
These have been issues that Icy & Sot have been focusing on since we first knew of them, and later when we welcomed them to our city – and ever since. Undeterred by repression of their home country, they moved here to Brooklyn to pursue a new life, only to find that the fundamentals of human rights and the rule of law are globally, constantly in need of defense.
Without exception, their work has remained focused and insistent as it has changed venue from street to gallery. Those same values are unwavering as the materials have shifted from aerosol to barbed wire and iron, from stencil and mural to rigid sculpture. Whether their deliberately unflashy pieces are mounted against a Californian desert landscape, an expanse of Rockaway Beach, or floating a Georgian river, the world plays an integral roll in the success and the message of their artworks – an ultimate hewing to the street art axiom that physical context is paramount to the message of a piece.
As Icy and Sot begin their new Familiar / Stranger exhibition at Danysz gallery in Paris, they are unbowed by their discovery as fine artists, unimpressed with the charade, immune to unnecessary artifice, mindful of the world as it has presented itself. The work, some of it brand new, quietly yells. The canvasses are spectacular; a product of hand-made tools and hand-pressed paint in such a streaming plaintive state of consciousness that it will never be purely aesthetic despite its patterned abstraction. The work is, like its authors, authentic.
“I want you to panic. I want you to act as if your house was on fire.”
– Greta Thunberg
The exhibition includes a set of video with an installation, as well as their more recent works ranging from sculpture to paintings all centered around the artists’ engagement for a more conscious world.
From the press release; “As writer Sasha Bogojev puts it, ‘In some way turning Greta’s inspiring words into poetic reality, Icy and Sot built a frame of an archetypal home and set it on fire. Allowing for the untouched surrounding nature to be seen between the blazing framework of the house, the artists suggest looking at the wider picture in which the Earth is our only home. The video shows the reversed footage of their installation being swallowed by flames and crumbling to the ground, creating an illusion of burning pieces of wood rising up and forming the familiar structure. With Greta’s voice in the background calling upon civil disobedience and rebellion, the video has a compelling incentive undertone reminding us that the change is possible if we put pressure on those in power.’ ”
Saturday, February 12, 2022
From 3 to 7PM
On view from February 12, to April 9, 2022
Danysz gallery
78 rue Amelot
Paris (Marais)
M° Saint-Sébastien-Froissart
One benefit of being ahead of your time is that you can paint your own rules, discover your own voice, set a standard. A drawback is that you may have to push forward on your own before you gain support for what you are pursuing. The key is to keep moving.
As Futura pulls fully into the frame of contemporary artist, its important for upcoming artists to remember that he had a long route – including being a bike messenger on Manhattan’s untamed streets to provide for his family – while he was waiting until the rest of the street and art world caught up with him. Now that Street Art has confirmed that his abstract explorations on subway trains were an early sign of what was coming, brands and gallerists and collectors often call. “Full Frame” helps appreciate the body of work he developed during that time.
Self named Futura 2000 when that sounded futuristic, Lenny Gurr has done more painting on canvas than he realized since the early 80s and his style has continued to evolve and clarify.
“Just for people to finally get a look at my work – I feel like a lot of what is being revealed hasn’t really been seen,” he tells us as he describes the nearly 300 page yellow tome “Full Frame,” published by Drago and organized by Magda Danysz. Among the richly illustrated pages, Danysz presents important benchmarks in Futura’s steadily growing career and personal life that bring the evolution closer to the reader.
In terms of the visual language in these sketches, diagrams and canvasses, there are a wealth of orbs and symbols and sprays and washes and stellar interstellar journeys that you have never seen before. Evolution appears to be natural for Futura, his pores and nerve endings collecting signals, firing synapses, pushing deep into imaginary worlds.
Influences run from expressionists, abstractionists, modernists, punks, the race to the moon and the moonage daydreams of city hippies everywhere. His recurring circle motifs are as much about his internal mind and world as they are about the cosmos.
A sense of balance in the chaos is always present, the palette choices impeccably on point, sharply sweet and frequently daring. Is this fantasy or diary? If Futura hasn’t flown to most of these places, it’s not because he hasn’t tried. But we’re treating these pages and frames of eye-popping other-worlds as evidence that he has.
“I think for the most part people appreciate survivors,” he is quoted in the book. Few survivors could be so freely percolating with ideas and graceful in their delivery.
“Art From the Streets”, an exhibition at the Art Science Museum in Singapore opened this weekend to coordinate with Singapore Art Week that runs from tomorrow until the end of the month with fairs, festivals and art exhibitions. Commercial art dealer and writer Magda Danysz curated the show with names she represents and whom you will be familiar with – Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Faile, and Futura, for example.
But she also brings an eclectic mix of others on her roster and possibly lent from some private collections. Collectively they span many of the high profile, the saleable and known over the past 5 decades from various disciplines and philosophical practices; In the case of Jacques Villeglé, whose practice of lacerating posters in the 1960s predates Failes’ by 4 decades, a lineage can be drawn. Other connections are not as easy.
Ultimately the collection gives a sense of the vast number of personalities and techniques that have characterized the street practice in Europe and North America primarily without focusing on any one specialty too greatly. Here are the revered names along with mid-career folks and current darlings who are sure to leave a mark. There is also a small inclusion of more regional favorites like Eko Nugroho from Indonesia, and Singapore’s Speak Cryptic, who each were on hand this weekend with many of the artists for the opening.
Giving tours with microphone in hand during the opening days, the energetic Ms. Danysz educates new fans and potential buyers about an organic artists scene that grew from the streets and is now more frequently being offered for sale in places such as her three gallery locations in London, Paris, and Shanghai. Today it is slowly appearing more often in museums as well.
“Conscious that promotion of the emerging scene is necessary, Magda Danysz took part in many fairs,” says a press release, “such as for example Art Brussels, Arte Fiera in Bologna, Artissima in Torino, Fiac in Paris or Pulse in New York, and is one of the four galleries at the origin of the Show Off Paris art fair.”
This weekend’s activities included short presentations panel discussions and a screen of Wild Style.
Art from the Streets tickets are $17.00 on the Marina Bay Sands website.
A complete list of artists varies online with artists listed on the museum website including:
Elsewhere online the roster is said to include 2Koa, Jef Aérosol, Ash, André, A-One, Aplickone, Banksy, Benjamin Duquenne, Tarek Benaoum, Stephane Bisseuil, Blek Le Rat, Boulaone, C215, Crash, Dface, Dondi, Dran, Eror729, Shepard Fairey, Faile, Futura, Keith Haring, Isham, Jayone, Jonone, Jr, Katre, Kaws, L’atlas, Lem, Ludo, Barry Mc Gee, Mikostic, Miss.Tic, Mode 2, Steve More, Nasty, Nord, Yoshi Omori, Os Gemeos, Psyckoze, Quik, Rammellzee, Recidivism, Rero, Remi Rough, Seen, Seth, Skki, Sore, Space Invader, Spazm, Spécio, Swoon, Tanc, Toxick, Vhils, Jacques Villeglé, Nick Walker, West, Yz, Zevs, Zhang Dali, Zlotykamien and Zuba.
The Magda Danysz gallery is pleased to welcome two major artists from the street art culture who have developed a style of their own : Dalek and Mike Giant. Though they have very different styles they talk about the same culture, the same influences, the same world.Dalek is one of the artists who as Shepard Fairey, Dave Kinsey, and Twist (aka Barry McGee) is taking the old school styles of graffiti and while exposing the work towhole new audiences at the same time.
Mike Giant has added the whole tattoo culture to his graffiti background. He started writing in 1989. Early on, he was influenced by his graffiti partners a lot, as well as by writers like Twist, Rem, and KR. A habit he has kept from his graffiti years asnow, Mike Giant uses words as the building blocks of language.
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