Gallery Heist is pleased to present The Reinvention of Nature, the San Francisco debut exhibition for Brooklyn/Baltimore based street artist GAIA. The Reinvention of Nature – Opening reception: Saturday, May 15, 2010, 7-11pm MAY 15 – MAY 31, 2010 Gaia is a Brooklyn and Baltimore based street artist with a background in Printmaking and Sculpture. He is currently enrolled in his final year at MICA (Maryland Institute of Art) with a major in interdisciplinary sculpture. At the age of 21 Gaia has built an impressive resume having exhibited in art fairs and galleries through out Brooklyn, London, D.C, Miami and Los Angeles. His work has appeared along side street art contemporary geniuses such as Blek Le Rat, Shepard Farey, Swoon, Matt Small, D*face, Sweettoof, Brian Adam Douglas, Lucas Price, Nick Walker, Slinkachu, Imminent Disaster, EVOL, Pisa 73, Oliver Vernon, and Dalek just to name a few.
Marrying the animal and the human form, Gaia conjures mysterious figures that carry a heavy sense of mythology and recall a past when man and nature were once united. These romantic creatures stand in relief to the urban environment as they lurk and beckon in the city’s forgotten and neglected spaces. The conveyance of their story relies on the chance coincidence with a passerby, and even in that intimate moment, their narrative is precarious and delicate. Gaia works with linocut prints and painted images applied to paper and then mounted as paste ups on the street or on panels for finished works.
ABOUT THE GALLERY Art is an extension of our culture and our communities and in many ways art defines our times. Art is not a luxury it is a necessity. My mission is to foster innovative artistic expression and provide sanctuary for the creative process while stressing the importance of it. The walls of Heist will house work that is representational to this generation offering a contemporary program of artists who challenge and analyze our social and cultural responsibility, traditions, and behaviors; artists who are on the forefront of a conscious art movement. To encourage and support this conscious art movement, I have opened Heist and hope that you will choose to be a part of it. Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 12:00-8:00pm Mondays by appointment. Gallery Heist is located at 679 Geary Street near the corner of Leavenworth, southeast of the intersection.
Props to Blek Le Rat, who started doing street art in Paris 3 decades ago -and is pointed to as an inspiration by everyone from Banksy and Fairey to a posse of new stencil artists.
I remember him telling me how hard it was for him to get anyone’s attention when he first came to New York in 1987 with his portfolio. He even sprayed a stencil on the sidewalk in front of Gagosian Gallery – to no discernible result. Gallerists absent-mindedly thumbed through his portfolio pieces and told him there wasn’t much interest in his work. So, hang in there kids, there is room for everybody, if you are persistent.
Blek is opening tonight with HUSH and ABOVE, two more high quality artists with roots in the street art scene, with the addition of starting in graffiti.
Thanks to Mike Cuffe at Warholian for sharing some of his pictures with us.
Hush uses graff and fine art elements – it’s all fair game – along with Japanese graphic novels.
The artist “Above” is self-referential here, taking his heaven pointing arrows that one typically sees hanging over your head and creating very highly polished reworkings of national flags.
JMR takes his usual pristine ne0-abstract lines and let’s them run in a new direction here – downward. An experienced muralist who can knock out 40 foot long walls in a couple of days, you can see his work on a building sized mural at the Pod Hotel in Manhattan, as well as a number of commissioned projects in Brooklyn.
This ‘Looking West’ Print to mark the “Hush” show at Shooting Gallery in SF is LOOKING INCREDIBLE.
As usual, you’ll see that Hush has again produced “a sensory assault of shape, color, and character.” I copied that off his blog.
Hush’s has been combining the aerosol/lettering of graff writing with fine art and Asian comic book aesthetics for a few years now. Seeing this, you know how he has really matured. This image is arresting.
From our interview with Hush last year before his show at Carmichael;
These are some of the pieces that street artist ROA showed this evening at his opening at the Pure Evil Gallery in London. Look forward to more ROA greatness at our auction April 24th and at his solo show at Factory Fresh in May.
Sometimes you see a ROA piece and it looks like a real animal that might peel off the wall and come over and stomp on your head. Or chomp off an ear. Chomp chomp chomp.
Our man Kriebel GETS THE STORY.
Kriebel! That’s his name; Our fearless videographer on the scene – Video shot like a wild animal itself has a camera strapped on it’s head, hurriedly and harriedly running through the jungle with un-glued urgency, freezing in place to stare at the giant-ish pig and huge pecking bird and many other creatures in the berserk brush-filled back lots of abandonment.
It is a bit long for my short attention span, and eventually the scariness of the bouncing video becomes more comic than creepy. It’s wayyyyyyy beautiful.
Thanks to the fine and furry Charley Uzzell Edwards, accidental gallerist of PURE EVIL, who have somehow managed to coax ROA in for a show that starts Thursday.
Did I mention ROA’s coming to BROOKLYN NEXT MONTH?
The cities were once our pastures, fish once jumped from the rivers, storks once combed these streets. And that’s easy to forget — which is why the work of Graffiti artist ROA can be so powerful, existing in ruined, deserted industrial spaces of the city.
R O A
Solo Exhibition at Pure Evil Gallery 8th APRIL – 2nd MAY 2010
ROA’s eagerly anticipated UK solo debut opens in London this spring to exhibit his unique portrayal of large scale urban wildlife, disquietly cohabiting city streets, hand painted in his distinctive black and white style.
ROA started painting abandoned buildings and warehouses in the isolated industrial outskirts of his hometown – Ghent, Belgium. Fixating on the animals he found there; the wildlife became the central subject matter of his work, inspired by their clever ability to adapt into scavengers in order to survive. He used the dilapidated, coarse interiors and exteriors of the unyielding landscape as a canvas to portray his large-scale creatures.
Roa filled a vast abandoned warehouse complex of different chambers and exteriors with a menagerie of large-scale animals, creating an impressive spray painted zoo of city scavengers.
His obsession went global when he took to the streets of New York, London, Berlin, Warsaw and Paris, prolifically painting his trademark cross sectioned animals wherever he went, locating them where they naturally invade the main city streets with their quiet yet powerful presence.
Pure Evil Gallery is proud and extremely excited to present a new body of original artwork by ROA this spring, complete with street works in the local area. Look out for a new ROA city fox appearing on a street near you.
Street Artist Billi Kid, known for poppy portraits of pink cadillacs and jetson era convertibles with his friends and artists at the wheel, George Bush as a WMD swinging cowboy, Sarah Palin as a bikini-clad NRA bimbo, and Jim Morrison doing his own special Easter tribute on a cross – graciously donated this cowboy in profile to the auction on the 24th.
Lyons Wier Gallery is pleased to present Anthony Lister’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, How to Catch a Time Traveler. The exhibition follows directly on the heals of Lister’s 50-foot, site-specific mural, “Red Dot”, created specifically for the Pulse Art Fair, NYC (2010), showcasing Lister’s undeniable signature style that has garnered him international acclaim.
Anthony Lister (courtesy Lyons Wier)
Known in the Low Brow movement for his intriguing, playful hybrid of street art,expressionism, and cubism; Lister’s new body of work shows the tongue-in-cheek frivolity of his earlier pieces developing (or decaying) into a more mature and disturbing direction. The deformities and un-done aesthetic resolve of Lister’s work provides viewers with a concretization of contemporary societies’ psyche – or, as the artist himself states, “making the obvious more, well, obvious”. In his latest series, Lister continues his examination of pop culture and how a generation raised on American television processes and interprets the symbols and imagery of their youth. The result is gender bending cartoon characters, and superheroes such as Wonder Woman and Bat Girl, that uncover the unconscious sexual desires and repressed taboos embedded in these seemingly innocuous popular icons. The work contains a circular perspective, one that shifts between, even confuses the non-rational inner workings of the child and adult mind. Yet this inescapable paradox of the human condition, wherein we are at all times evolving from and dependant upon the experiences of youth, is unlocked by Lister’s painterly antics, and revealed to be the utterly serious and impossibly ridiculous condition it is. Lister’s practice is indeed about reality. A reality his work does not claim to resolve, but rather to question, loudly.
Anthony Lister has shown widely internationally in solo exhibitions at Metro 5, Melbourne; K Gallery, Milan; Spectrum Gallery, London; Criterion Gallery, Hobart; and the Wooster Collective, New York; among others. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, Australian Art Collector, Vogue Magazine, Modern Painters, Paper Magazine, Art in America and VICE Magazine. Lister’s work is present in many reputable collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the David Roberts Collection, the TVS Partnership and the BHP Collection.
Lister is the receipient of the Prometheus Award (2009, 2005), the Dobell Prize for Drawing (2008) and the ABN Amro Art Award (2007).
Andrew Hosner at Thinkspace Gallery could have gotten a little nervous when he saw pics of the new 3-dimensional back skirt that Imminent Disaster was making in Brooklyn for the show that opens tomorrow in L.A.
A protective blanket guards the hem during installation (photo courtesy ThinkSpace)
But, new pictures reveal that the cut-paper sculpture made it and today’s progress looks like the show will open tomorrow night with no hitches or stitches.
Armsrock and Imminent D. have been taking over the gallery with their theme of refuge, referring to the millions of people on earth who are pushed from their homes by political persecution or war or environmental disaster.
One of Armsrocks’ pieces is also a sculpture of sorts; “Weight of the World”, Ink & graphite on paper affixed to a globe. (image courtesy ThinkSpace)
Looking at some of the first images, one cannot help think of the temporary housing that we have seen set up for victims of recent earthquakes.
Found wood pieces strung together with twine frame this cut paper piece by Imminent Disaster (image courtesy ThinkSpace)
Of the transformation of the gallery, Hosner says, “Man, they are going to town. The space looks epic.”
“Laura Reclining” by Imminent Disaster, Hand cut paper hand sewn to quilted fabric (courtesy ThinkSpace)
– don’t know why I say it that way but it seems that the streets had a few more historical references and sudden intricate storylines when Gore B. was around. His new “drawing” show opening at Pandemic Gallery in South Williamsburg tomorrow features densely layered elements in black white and silver – all of his favorites: painted portraits from early photos, symbols from science, religious and maybe astronomy textbooks, ornate filigranic linework, and an ongoing fascination with type styles and letter faces.
But Gore B. will not be alone at Pandemic by any means on Friday – “Stokenphobia”, a show about two geometric shapes, will feature the work of around 40 street artists and friends in a show of community love for signage.
For the non-eggheads reading this – stokenphobia is fear of circles – so Pandemic has provided small rectangular shaped metal signs to a number of people to create a piece on.
Says Robbie D. of Pandemic, “It’s kind of sporadic. There was no real theme except ‘Just do whatever you feel on the objects we give you.’ We provided the metal signs and basically everybody is allowed to do what they want. So there’s no real theme to the artwork – it’s just about the shapes.”
Speaking about the makeup of the group who was invited to participate in the show, Robbie D say, “Mainly they are street artists but there are a lot of friends and artists who don’t work on the street but work in a studio. So it’s really just acquaintances and other street art people we respect and have known for a while now – kind of a close group of people that we know.”
These are not heady times, but neither are they maudlin. We’re just getting really focused on some things that are a bit more consequential.
If the Whitney Biennial 2010 is taking hits for being restrained due to budgetary cuts and the Armory is criticized for being overblown, you could say the Fountain show is optimized for impact. Now in it’s 4th year, there wasn’t any fatty hype that needed to be trimmed. With some of the machine-fog of a bubbled art market clearing, it’s not surprising that there are some strong voices here.
Fountain for me is a kind of raw, dense, and measured survey of the moment, and curator David Kesting steers this 10,000 sf. ship of serious mis-content with an uncanny skill for cutting out the flim-flam. Herding cats can be easier than directing artists, and a fair number of these felines may border on feral, but the bow is pointed in a surprisingly assured direction. Because of it’s outsider billing you could expect anarchy here but in many ways this collection of 20 or so galleries, collectives, and projects can be rather unified.
And it couldn’t possibly be more thoughtful – Whether it is a Swoon benefit rep speaking earnestly about sustainable communities, La Familia’s co-founder Jennifer Garcia explaining their nearly 50-member collective’s contemplation of the definition of family, Gregg Haberny’s hyper-wrought stabs at oil oligarchy and hypocrisy in general, street artist Zeus’ dripping corporate logos, or Dave Tree’s shovel-blunt criticisms of agribusiness’s seedless produce, you get the idea that somebody is actually studying the underbelly. All this frankness is refreshingly hopeful and many pieces are downright fun. But if these are the artists in the margins that portend our future, we may be heading for a cultural awakening and radical realignment of society.
The projects in Fountain New York 2010 include NYC based collective The Art Bazaar, Christina Ray – Swoon Benefit for the Braddock PA Studios, Leo Kesting Gallery from New York, Galerie Zeitgeist from Paris, the Brooklyn based project Open Ground, Baltimore based Nudashank Gallery, We-Are-Familia artists collective which will be displaying their keep-sake boxes with work from Whitney Biennale 2010 artist Rashaad Newsome, LA based website ArtSlant, Shelter Island Projects Boltax Gallery and Sara Nightingale Gallery, CREON gallery, UK based Holster Projects and artists installations by: Alison Berkoy, Miguel Parades, Seth Mathurin, Temporary States and Gawker Artists.
Fountain NY 2010
Pier 66 at 26th St in Hudson River Park NY, NY 10011 Telephone: 917.650.3760 Email: info@fountainexhibit.com Website: http://fountainexhibit.com Dates: March 4-7; 11am–7pm
Street art welcomes all manner of materials and methods, typically deployed without permission and without apology. This hand-formed wire piece …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
Gallery Heist is pleased to present The Reinvention of Nature, the San Francisco debut exhibition for Brooklyn/Baltimore based street artist GAIA. The Reinvention of Nature – Opening reception: Saturday, May 15, 2010, 7-11pm MAY 15 – MAY 31, 2010 Gaia is a Brooklyn and Baltimore based street artist with a background in Printmaking and Sculpture. He is currently enrolled in his final year at MICA (Maryland Institute of Art) with a major in interdisciplinary sculpture. At the age of 21 Gaia has built an impressive resume having exhibited in art fairs and galleries through out Brooklyn, London, D.C, Miami and Los Angeles. His work has appeared along side street art contemporary geniuses such as Blek Le Rat, Shepard Farey, Swoon, Matt Small, D*face, Sweettoof, Brian Adam Douglas, Lucas Price, Nick Walker, Slinkachu, Imminent Disaster, EVOL, Pisa 73, Oliver Vernon, and Dalek just to name a few.
