Australian Street Artist Reka was in town in the wake of the hurricane named Sandy and he found his plans for painting disrupted by flooded train lines, but eventually got up in three places in Brooklyn. On tour from his native Melbourne since July, Bushwick is just one more name to be tacked onto the list of places for Reka (or Reka One or James Reka) along with Amsterdam, Berlin, Bristol, London, Milan, Paris and the countryside in France.
REKA. Bushwick Five Points, Nov, 2012 NYC (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Here he brought his signature abstract portraits rendered in ochre, beige, moss, brown, black, white, rusted crimson and spice red. Typically illustrative of the female form, these figures are full of action with limbs and hands and elbows akimbo, gesticulating into air, flustered and animated with limbs bending from rivets at the joints. With wavelets of the darkest hair spilling and often with breasts barely pinned in or spinning free to make waves, Reka’s ladies in Brooklyn are unhinged consternation, contemplative and concerned, somehow heavy in their cubist side/front viewed expressions.
REKA. Bushwick Five Points, Nov, 2012 NYC (photo © Jaime Rojo)
The forms photographed here by Jaime Rojo may be cognizant of the destruction that New York is still dealing with, where homes are being bulldozed, many school buildings are permanently closed, checks are lost in the mail, and many families are reliant on others for food and shelter. Rendered in colors we associate with autumn, these new Reka figures are of this moment in Brooklyn, even as the artist moves on in search of his next spot to paint.
REKA. Bushwick Five Points, Nov, 2012 NYC (photo © Jaime Rojo)
REKA. Bushwick Five Points, Nov, 2012 NYC (photo © Jaime Rojo)
REKA. Bushwick Five Points, Nov, 2012 NYC (photo © Jaime Rojo)
REKA. Bushwick Five Points, Nov, 2012 NYC (photo © Jaime Rojo)
REKA. Bushwick Five Points, Nov, 2012 NYC . Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
REKA. Bushwick, Nov, 2012 NYC (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Other Articles You May Like from BSA:
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2021. We have selected some of our favorite shots from the yea...
The celebrated but now ruinous Arnau Theater in Barcelona sits patiently awaiting to be revived. Once an effervescent center of spectacle and entertainment the theater opened its doors in 1894 and thr...
Street Artist and mural painter Gola Hundun sends us images from this new wall on a rooftop terrace in Kazakhstan and of himself in the nude to celebrate it. “The work represents for me the three worl...
We're up to our necks in deep frosty wind-whipping winter, and yet the Street Art right now is verbose, detailed, bright eyed, distinct, political, critical, stylish, dense, richly colorful. ...
Positioned as an ironic truth-teller with a sense of humor, Portuguese visual artist, illustrator, and street Artist Wasted Rita uses her droll texts and lo-fi illustrations to skewer societal and st...