Saturday fun today from local Barcelona graphic designer Núria Toll, who’s sort of new to the experience of doing murals and art on the street.
Translating her own history with illustration and typography, Ms. Toll finds that humor is a welcome antidote to the negativity that is produced by our invasions of animals’ natural habitats.
Here with “Veïnes” (female neighbors in Catalan), her seagulls are meant to remind us that the natural world was here first, and we should make a home for all of us. The seagulls are rather good at integrating, and Toll here is giving them their due.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. MADC at Dresden Airport 2. Jorge Rodriguez-Gerarda “COR” Santa Coloma de Gramanet 3. Murfy: Paisaje De Vida 4. ZTwins / Industrial Aesthetics
BSA Special Feature: MadC at Dresden Airport Old Terminal
“This kind of concept here is that you really see how I evolved during the last 22 years,” says MadC as she traces her own history in cans here in this old terminal in Dresden, Germany. It’s like going to school.
Taking a page from the Selina Miles/ Sofles playbook, Red Tower Films documents crisply the aerosol slaughter of an airport, rocking hard to a steadily snapping pentameter.
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Jorge Rodriguez-Gerarda “COR” Santa Coloma de Gramanet
A nice meditative timelapse called PAISAJES DE VIDA by Murfy, presenting a window into a massive natural valley.
ZTwins / Industrial Aesthetics
From Belgorod, Russia (“The White City”) come the ZTwins to talk about their roots as kids in this industrial city of factories and abandoned worksites. They tell you that this helped them develop what they call “Industrial Aesthetics”
Love seeing people like this high school gent on the train and in the street and on the elevator and in the store – in gentle anticipation of giving a rose to the one he has a crush on. Sending love to all of you today.
BSA readers know that we’ve always been democratic about the work we show here- because that’s really how to best understand the evolution of the scene.
The illegal small stuff you find actually tells you a great deal – the selection is a barometer of sorts. These works aren’t permitted, commissioned, sold, traded or co-opted ususally, untouched by the voracious appetites of advertising and consumerism
We love murals, don’t get us wrong. But we are always making certain to return to where things began for us; the small, eclectic mix of blink-and-you-miss-it pieces on the streets.
They come in all forms; stencils, stickers, wheat pastes, sculptures, crafts and small drawings. In some cases, we know the artist who created the piece and often we do not. But everyone gets a chance to address the public in the lively Street Art scene, and we bring to you a small selection of pieces we’ve found recently.
The transition from graffiti to abstract painter invariably captures our attention. The two disciplines that would be so insulated from one another, yet many times we find a graffiti writer who fifteen years after spraying his first illegal tag is now parsing a very different visual language.
Alexey Luka. Wall #1. Premio Antonio Giordano Festival. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of Marianna Giordano)
Then you think of the endless permutations of wildstyle and all the subgenres of the graffiti practice of deconstruction as applied to the letterform. It is only a short jump from there to complete abstraction.
In the case of Russian Street Artist Alexey Luka, the route was made smoother perhaps by his study of architecture, provided entrée to a less literal interpretation of shape and form. Here his two newest wall pieces in Santa Croce di Magliano (CB), Italy, remind us of his wooden wall sculptures, assemblages as well, the palette warm and the snug overlapping feeling of the forms is almost nested.
Alexey Luka. Wall #1. Premio Antonio Giordano Festival. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of Marianna Giordano)
For this fifth edition of the Antonio Giordano Urban Art Award in October and November, we are told that Alexey has hidden organic forms and even faces in his work. We’ll leave it up to your sleuthing and imagination to identify them. See anything?
Alexey Luka. Wall #1. Premio Antonio Giordano Festival. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of Marianna Giordano)Alexey Luka. Wall #2. Premio Antonio Giordano Festival. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of Marianna Giordano)Alexey Luka. Wall #2. Premio Antonio Giordano Festival. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of Marianna Giordano)Alexey Luka. Wall #2. Premio Antonio Giordano Festival. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of Marianna Giordano)
In a multicultural city like Barcelona, where it’s estimated that there are people from 114 nationalities, Santa Coloma de Gramenet Town Hall has commissioned artist Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada to find a unifying vision.
Indeed with his new ground mural completed over 10 days with 3 assistants, Rodríguez-Gerada goes to the CŎRE of the matter. Probably the work was good for their hearts, maybe not for their knees.
Curated by Anja Mila and Arcadi Poch this public work aims to encompass metaphorically the history of the city as well as the lifeblood that courses through its veins today.
The results are impressive, and you’ll probably be able to see it on Google maps. Not yet though. We just checked.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Buff Monster, Case Ma’Claim, Crash, HAKS 180, Invader, Loomit, Madsteez, Space Invader, and Speedy Graphito.
Contemporary Berlin is a city of many faces. It’s vibrant and intoxicating. It feels safe and welcoming. It’s raw and sleek, organic and planned, clangorous and calm. It’s also joyfully permissive, allowing space for you to create, discover and explore- even as the locals complain of the shadow of gentrification that is cast upon the bohemian enclaves.
While we can’t call Berlin a second home we can say that we have fallen in love with it. We especially treasured the friendships that we forged with many talented artists and creatives who have come to the city to explore their ideas and to take their risks, climbing walls (some of them literally) to make things happen.
Berlin, it seems to us, is teeming with energized young, middle aged, old people from all over Europe and beyond who have come here to this nerve center to open the creative power that we’re going to need to seize back the Earth from darkness.
Sweeping, kinetic, full of life and teeming with possibility, this is the Berlin that many find at this moment, a series of stations to discover and celebrate.
With direction by Diego Gueler (Sasho) and musical score balancing by Matías Córdova, here is their love letter to Berlin.
“Berlinstation is a ticket to enjoy and get excited with the urban art and street musicians of the capital of the cultural avant-garde of Europe. A trip of video art, photo-animations, timelapse, slowmotion and landscapes of the city intertwined with talents without borders.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 4 Videos from Penique Productions
BSA Special Feature: 4 in a Row from Penique
It’s a simple concept for redefinition of inner dimensions that blows up in your space.
Today we are highlighting 4 videos from Penique Productions, a unique artists collective based in Barcelona/Rio De Janeiro that “conquers” space with monochrome plastic.
Their installations are immersive, transformative, and allow you to have fun inside of them. Our space in Madrid is going to be wrapped by these “Christos of the Indoors” in a few weeks when we host BSA Talks at Urvanity March 1,2, and 3.
More on that exciting program soon, but today we thought we’d share with you the work of Penique!
A corollary to 2015’s “Tracing Morocco” by German street artist Hendrik Beirkirch (aka ECB), a new book travels to meet the rugged inhabitants of Siberia’s countryside in the Russian Federation. The results are starkly genuine, impressively authentic.
Hendrik Beikirch. “SIBERIA” Editons mare & martin. Paris. 2018
Again indulging us in the deep crevasses of many a weathered façade, Siberia invites you to meet the people whom he has met in his travel and presumably befriended, given their ease as subjects. A part of the Jardin Rouge stable over the past few years, Beirkirch has followed the lead of founder Jean Louis Haguenauer, the Frenchman who moved to Russia in the early 1980s and found his own odyssey outside the city to be formative to his character, leading him to write the introduction to the handsome tome.
Hendrik Beikirch. “SIBERIA” Editons mare & martin. Paris. 2018
“The work produced is a testimony, a memoir,” says
Haguenauer, “These modern faces that hark back to the past, these women and men
immortalized on canvas, ambassadors of their trades and their regions on walls
around the world, convey another image of the largest region on the planet and
of a sadly little-known country, of which we wish to provide a new vision. It
is the everyday women and men, passionately living their trades, who are the
heroes of this new project.”
Indeed there are few signs of artifice or romanticism in the
sure-footed subjects here, and you are offered a glimpse of their context with
some of these new portraits. Seeing them translated to grand scale as murals
spanning towers is remarkable, and one can only imagine what impact they have
on the people who live in or pass through these neighborhoods. Scattered through a number of cities, there
is a familiar feeling in each of these strangers, perhaps feeling like family
to some.
Hendrik Beikirch. “SIBERIA” Nina. Editons mare & martin. Paris. 2018
“Untainted by any attempt at idealization, the faces of those portrayed tell the story of real life,”
says Arne Zyprian in an opening essay. “Paradoxically, these anonymous guises
pictured on a vast scale on the sides of buildings offer a break from the
overall anonymity of the cities and give them a face.”
Interspersed with canvasses and murals are observations that attempt to examine why we find the singular visages so compelling. There is a temptation to look at a new people in cultures different from our own as the exotic “other”, to simplify their existence by what we can observe on the outside, or to project our own inner dynamics on to the faces that we see.
Hendrik Beikirch. “SIBERIA” Nina. Editons mare & martin. Paris. 2018
One thing is for certain, Beirkirch has found through technique and experience a way for each of these people to become somehow relatable.
“Hendrik pours all of his love for humanity into his
portraits,” says Jean Louis. “There is never any aggression or bitterness in
these people.” Perhaps that is how most of us would like to be seen as well.
Hendrik Beikirch. “SIBERIA” Vlasov. Editons mare & martin. Paris. 2018Hendrik Beikirch. “SIBERIA” Vera. Editons mare & martin. Paris. 2018Hendrik Beikirch. “SIBERIA” Editons mare & martin. Paris. 2018Hendrik Beikirch. “SIBERIA” Aleksandr Pavlovich. Editons mare & martin. Paris. 2018Hendrik Beikirch. “SIBERIA” Tatyana. Editons mare & martin. Paris. 2018
A recent article in The New York Times caught our attention this week and it made us think about Street Artist ROA, and his many paintings in the street depicting them.
The article reported that 9 tons of pangolins scales had been seized in Hong Kong, the scales were hidden under slabs of frozen meat on a cargo ship en route to Vietnam. The most frequently trafficked mammal in the world, the Pangolin suffers when it’s killed for its scales – believed to be a cure for cancer or asthma, among other things.
Pangolins, or scaly anteaters, are not as well known to audiences worldwide but we thought we’d give this darling of a mammal a shout out today and in the process bring attention to the plight of our planet.
When are we going to stop destroying ourselves by destroying our natural resources? Everything we do creates an impact.
Back in 2014 we published an article with a photo diary by Belgian artist
ROA. He had traveled for several months from Brazil to The Gambia with stops in
Australia, New Zealand, Spain and Rome. Here is what he had to say about his
experience in The Gambia with the pangolin:
“I’ve painted a pangolin before in The Gambia but being back there and having read so much during the past year about the illegal trafficking of pangolins – to be served as exotic food or mostly as a ‘medicine’, I needed to paint them again.
“Firstly, the so-called medical qualities of the ground-up scales are disputed and “the animals are currently on the list of endangered species because of the trafficking and the loss of habitat by deforestation in Africa,” explains ROA.
He notes that one of their unique attempts to protect themselves is to reconfigure their appearance. “They can roll up into a ball to defend themselves,” he says.
Belgian Street Artist Adele winged it over to New Delhi last week to bring one of her multi-feathered friends to this new wall in the Lodhi Colony.
With her mother as assistant (and photographer) the intensely detailed and passionate aerosolist hardly stopped while a steady parade of people and animals interrupted their daily travels to gander at the huge bird taking form in front of them.
January is the only cold month in Delhi, she tells us, so she felt quite lucky to be able to paint during a period of relative comfort. “I was greeted by stray dogs every morning,” she says.
“And I was fueled by fresh coconut water, chai, and amazing lunch boxes! It was so nice being in the trees with the birds and monkeys, and all school kids and rickshaw drivers stopping by all day long.”
Adele says she was thankful for a rare opportunity to spend quality time together with her mom Veronique and says they plan to continue their trip through India. We’re pleased to share her photos exclusively for BSA readers today.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
