El Sol 25 and Hannah Höch – “Persons of Interest”

BSA is in Berlin this month to present a new show of 12 important Brooklyn Street Artists at the Urban Nation haus as part of Project M/7. PERSONS OF INTEREST brings to our sister city a diverse collection of artists who use many mediums and styles in the street art scene of Brooklyn. By way of tribute to the special relationship that artist communities in both cities have shared for decades, each artist has chosen to create a portrait of a Germany-based cultural influencer from the past or present, highlighting someone who has played a role in inspiring the artist in a meaningful way.

Today we talk to El Sol 25 and ask him why he chose his person of interest, Hannah Höch.

A collage artist who often creates paintings of his original cut compositions and wheat-pastes them onto walls, El Sol 25 has been entertaining and perplexing passersby on the street with his theater of the absurd for the last half decade in New York. Considered part of the new breed of Street Artists who are breaking conventions, for this show El Sol 25 looks back to a Berlin rebel and one of the most important collage artists of the 20^th Century, Hannah Höch, for inspiration and as tribute.

Indeed there are many similarities in the works of both; a true fragmentation of elements that reflects a chaotic aspect of current society, an embracing of diversity and abstraction, the questioning of gender constructions, even the inclusion of elements that may have shown in Höch’s fictional “ethnographic museum”. Where Höch was a singular woman in a Dada movement dominated by men, the former graff writer El Sol 25 has steadily constructed his unusual oeuvre in a sometimes sea of Street Art sameness.

El Sol 25 is creating a portrait of Höch for PERSONS OF INTEREST because she proved to be a leader and because he admires her different standards of composition and beauty. “She’s one of my all time favorites and also a native German so I really wanted to pay my respect by painting her portrait,” he says. “She was a key innovator in the original Dada movement and her collages are the strongest I’ve ever seen.”

Then he adds, “She is my hero for many reasons.”