Opening reception on September 22
12-16 in the presence of the artist.
The exhibition runs until October 13
A Gallery
Sofierogatan 3
412 51 Göteborg
info@agallery.se
www.agallery.se
A Gallery is pleased to welcome Shai Dahan to the Gallery with a new body of work that represents his distinctive aesthetic and continually evolving style. Please join us for a reception with the artist on Saturday, September 22nd, 2012.
Shai demonstrates aesthetic elements that encompass both contemporary and traditional techniques of urban art much like the way he performs his art outdoors. Each of Shai’s works is an explosion of layered graffiti text or heavy layers of painted drips or gestural brushstrokes. Working with acrylics, spray paint, and at times, watercolors, his works have an organized chaos that is both compelling and appealing.
Shai has been inspired by cultural motifs from around the world. From Swedish Dalahorses to Palestinian Beduins, Shai finds a way to create motifs that are a piece of the world he is surrounded by and the world of urban art. Even the extended violence throughout the world, with ever roaring emergence of riots, Shai finds a way to create playful and somewhat humorous body of work in a small collection of watercolor paintings depicting riot police and rioters interacting in playful activities.
In other works, Shai finds beauty in the destruction of luxury items. Creating large scale paintings of collectible automotive, Shai takes away the social standard of what is beautiful and replaces it with a new vision for beauty by creating graffiti tags among these luxurious pieces. This body of work documents Shai development as an artist, and the new ways in which he is approaching his subject. By reworking, combining, and appropriating tags from his own local neighborhood, Shai’s new works are intricately layered with fine art and urban substance and contain an unprecedented sense of beauty in ruins.
About the artist:
Shai lives in Boras, Sweden with his wife and two dogs and exhibits both nationally and internationally. His work has been shown in numerous shows around the United States including New York and Los Angeles, and in solo shows including Stockholm and Boras Konst Museum. His work has been published in several books and magazines. Shai will be speaking at TEDxGothenburg in October and will also be taking part of numerous projects, lectures and workshops throughout the remainder of 2012.
Hope you got a taste for a nice icy Frozade, because we’ve got a hell of a photo show coming to 350 Broadway this Friday: the one and only Ricky Powell, designated visual cataloguer of New York City’s hip-hop history, will be bringing a selection of his work to the store in a collection entitled Back In BK. Never more than a lens away from the heart of NYC’s street scene since the 1980s, Powell captures the vibrancy of this city and its music, whether its through pictures of stars like The Beastie Boys and Run DMC or citizens rambling through the village.
Back in BK will show off work from his entire career, a portal into a New York long past and a window the one that still thrives just outside your door. As usual, we’re throwing a party to celebrate the opening night, and I have to imagine that Mr. Powell will be bringing out quite the crew. So be sure to come by 350 Broadway this Friday night. Come back to BK. You know you want to.
Friday September 21st, 2012, 7-10PM Мишка NYC
350 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
Occupy did more than grab some headlines and inconvenience workers on Wall Street last year. It blew a hole open in the consciousness of a confused and battered public untethered and afloat in debt, denial, and 700 channels of mind-numbing distraction. As a result of the Occupy Movement and all it’s permutations, in many unexpected ways we woke up – we became enlivened, enraged, enthused, and possibly enlightened.
Colorful and chaotic and unsettling in all its imperfections, this social awakening on the streets continues to talk to us and we continue to listen, even as powerful forces do everything to convince us that it’s over. If you monitor the messages of Street Art and graffiti, you know that the desire for social and economic justice can be strident and ongoing, and people are pretty pissed off.
Marking the one year anniversary of this citizens movement that has successfully shifted the public discourse and has introduced new terms to the collective vocabulary, here is a collection of images taken by photographer Jaime Rojo during the last year that captures some of the spirit and sentiment of the street.
We’re keeping it local today with an empty patch of real estate on Manhattan’s Lower East Side called “The Grassy Lot” that’s been semi-curated for about a year with an eclectic mix of American and Australian ex-pats. It’s a nice little patch of grass that is sometimes rented out for events and receptions – also it is used occasionally for rumored topless sunbathing, water balloon fights, or the periodic impromptu late night assignation after stumbling out of a nearby watering hole.
Like all fun things, Summer is drawing to a close, at least officially. For those of you who walk the streets of this city either with your eyes closed or fixed on your belly button we inform you that it was the Summer of Love ’12 for The Yok and Sheryro, who stayed at the top of the aerosol charts due to their sheer industry. This little lot has some examples of their stuff, but really they seemed to get up all over. Here also is Queen Andrea, who has also been making a strong showing of late, along with stuff from Cake, Cern, Daek1, Gaia, Nanook, Never, and Sean Morris.
Brooklyn impresario Joe Franquinha of Crest Art Show fame was the procurer of art at “The Grassy Lot” again this year and we extend our gratitude to him for letting us give a peak to BSA readers.
That’s kind of how this expansive space feels with no people in it. It is a universe created by a post-graffiti graffiti godfather who has freed his own imagination to search for new planets of influence, new centers of intelligence. Many of the New York graffiti artists who made names on trains in the 1970s and early 80s found a track to transition to the future, whether through evolving their style or reprising it again and again. When you look at the influence of 20th century fine art abstraction as it has matured on the Street Art scene of the last decade, this cat may have begun in this retro-future, and we’re now just catching up to him.
Thirty years after he took his work into the gallery from the trainyards, Futura reminds us of the greater possibilities of aerosol as a tool for expression, exploration. The power of the works as presented is cosmic; explosive, exploratory, often serene. Fire and lava formations, oceans, suns, patterned reflections and free nebulous images as captured by powerful telescopes as they float above us. While his hand is freestyle and almost impulsive, Futura can be as selectively deliberate as he is uncontrolled. Viewed in this wide open and darkened gallery galaxy, the space-age illumination gives the works a feeling of astronomy, with each canvas a floating body in the cosmos, clearly viewed from your own porthole. But it’s clear who the north star is.
Thursday 27th September, a private preview for Sponsors, VIP’s and collectors with artists present. A selection of left-field DJ’s will be providing the soundtrack, a mix of classic and contemporary sounds.
Saturday 29th / Sunday 30th September. An ensemble of artists will paint live in London.
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“We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.” – Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto, 1909.
SYMMETRY ACROSS CENTURIES
In 1912, just three years after the manifesto was published, the Futurists exhibited in London for the first time. A hundred years later on September 27th, 2012, just three years after the creation of Graffuturism.com, the Graffuturists will exhibit for the first time in London at Blackall Studios.
THE IDEALS OF DYNAMISM AND PROGRESSION
At the core of both movements are the parallel ideals of “dynamism” and “progression.” Both of these keywords conjure a sense of action, motion and movement, wavering disturbances of change pulsing forward, like an electrocardiogram, along a historical continuum into the future. Marinetti extolled the virtues of a dynamic art form that was alive and motivated; Poesia, the founder of Graffuturism.com, has stated that the word Graffuturism was inspired by the desire to articulate a progressive impetus for graffiti.
URBAN, ONLINE, GLOBAL
Uplifting arms together in spirit, both these movements revel in the urban environment as a petri dish for the advancements and inventions of their age. Just as Futurism embraced the Industrial Age and its recently mechanized urban centers, Graffuturism embraces the Digital Age and its recently wired urban-global community. For the Futurists, the ideals of dynamism were expressed in images of their century’s new inventions, such as the motor car, the steam engine, the airplane, the telephone; whereas for the Graffuturists, the icons of salvation are the subway car, electric/ diesel freight trains, markers, spray paint, rollers, fire extinguishers, and so on. A different set of symbols for this century, but still imbued with the same impetus.
GRAFFITI, PAINTING AND ABSTRACTION
Because of the global composition of the group, the Graffuturists consist of disparate backgrounds, professions, and locations. They create in different styles, but their unifying theme is abstraction, their medium is painting, and their influence is graffiti. In their work on the streets and on canvas, these painters aspire to a high level of proficiency at their craft, which creates a visual poetry of depth and complexity. The Graffuturists could be classified as a High Style New Millennium Painting movement, consisting of a long dialectic and cross-pollination between advanced graffiti and fine art painting techniques.
Wildstyle Graffiti is combined with Abstract Expressionism or Geometric Abstraction, then transposed through the artist’s unique vision into a personal vocabulary of hybrid techniques, an experimental mix of the high and low, the intellectual and visceral, the visionary and the primitive. Whereas the Street Art movement of the mid-2000s tended to focus on collaged and wheat-pasted illustrations and figurative stencils, this group of artists focuses on the act of Painting, whether on the street or off, whether with spray paint or oils, with a fat cap or a sable brush.
Just as Be-bop developed from jazz, Raw Magazine from Superman comics, and Wildstyle from Original Writing, Graffuturism progresses from graffiti, and then takes up the oily-rag torch to ignite the future.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Cern, Dain, El Sol 25, ETAM, Hef, Ka TVT, Kosbe, Lae, Lucx, Meks, Never, Nice-One, Phetus, Pilot, Reyes, Rez, RONE, Sebs, Skewville, Such, Vers, Victor Reyes, and Yes One.
The show is looking great! And we’re happy to make a few new announcements below. We sent this out to the email list with an incorrect photo for the Kofie Augustine image below so if you got one of those in your email box we apologize.
JUST ANNOUNCED – FREE SHUTTLE BUS SERVICE courtesy Brooklyn Crab! Service from F/G train at the Carroll Street Station to the Gallery and crab house and back to the train, free.
Brand new gallery work from 11 Street Artists, including Augustine Kofie, Chor Boogie, Drew Tyndell, Feral Child, Hellbent, Jaye Moon, Maya Hayuk, MOMO, OLEK, OverUnder, See One.
It’s good to have sense of humor in life, helps you get through it actually. Like remember when your dog died and you thought that pretty much that was the end of the world as we know it and you didn’t want to live and you didn’t ever want to see another Collie or even a German Shepherd ever again and you avoided that TV channel that played re-runs of “Lassie”? Then your brother came home and told you a bunch of new fart jokes he learned out behind the school that day while the jocks were practicing football? Those were wicked funny right? That helped a little, right?
Don’t Fret is the name of a Chicago Street Artist who has been putting up comedically human wheat-pastes for a couple of years now and every time you see one you gotta chuckle. He makes inside outside jokes that you can relate to – but doesn’t pander. Tonight if you are in San Francisco you can go see a bunch of new work by Don’t Fret and get a greater appreciation for the scope of internal thoughts and considerations that this creative mind gets sidetracked and entertained with.
Don’t Fret solo show “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Chardonnay” Opens tonight at the Grand Bizzare Gallery in Chicago. Click here for details on this show and make sure to watch the teaser video below:
It’s a BSA Fun Friday and we’re gonna tell you all about some stoopendous Street Art shows this weekend from Brooklyn to Chicago to Paris to Vienna but first….Everybody get up and do some FF dancing like my homeboy PSY in Korea.
This sh*t is Gangnsta, bro.
SEOUL, YOU THINK YOU GOT TALENT…
1. VIDEO “Gangnam Style” Dance Frenzy from Korea
2. Bäst Sells Olive Oil and Opens New Show at Opera Gallery (NYC)
3. “Just Your Type” at Low Brow Artique (BKLN)
4. LUDO “Metal Miltia” at Galerie Itinerrance (PARIS)
5. “All Write You Scumbags” with Reyes and Steel at Klughaus (Chinatown, NYC)
6. “Dominant Species” by ROA at 941 Geary (San Francisco)
7. GAIA, MOMO AND MICHAEL OWEN in “Zim Zum” (Baltimore)
8. Don’t Fret in “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Chardonnay”(Chicago)
9. Tel Aviv: Israeli Street Artist and poet Know Hope “Others’ Truths”
10. The Black River Festival in Vienna, Austria
11. Stephen Powers AKA ESPO “A Love Letter for You”
12. “Permanence at Space 27 Gallery in Montreal, Canada
13. eL Seed in Tunisia (VIDEO)
14. When Lucent Met Herakut (VIDEO)
15. Voice Of Art “Graffiti Against The System” Presents GATS (VIDEO)
Bäst Sells Olive Oil and Opens New Show at Opera Gallery (NYC)
Street Artist Bäst has always mixed a savory chopped image salad. With his dicing, cutting, collaging and stencilling work on the street over the last decade, a lot of his recent stencils are twisted Bodega style signs advertising basic staples for the pantry. But of all the collaborative advertising that Street Artists have been getting into, we never could have predicted this; Olive oil. You can actually go to snooty classist foodery Dean and Deluca and buy a bottle of Bast style olive oil right now. Only 500 were made in this limited edition and the oil smells better than the petroleum-spilled brownfields in industrial Bushwick where you usually see his work, so why not?
This Brooklyn native artist has been amusing, hijacking, and inspiring with his work on the streets of New York for well over a decade and it’s also cool to see his gallery work at his solo show “Germs Tropicana” opened last night at Opera in Manhattan. If the pieces are too pricey, Dean and Deluca is just a couple of blocks away!
For further information regarding this show click here.
“Just Your Type” at Low Brow Artique (BKLN)
Outside is the brand new wall piece by ND’A and Dirty Bandits. Inside this art store/gallery they are joined QRST and Gilf! in this new small show called “Just Your Type”, opening tonight.
For further information regarding this show click here.
LUDO “Metal Miltia” at Galerie Itinerrance (PARIS)
Parisian Street Artist LUDO was in multiple shows around the world and blanketed the Paris Metro and bus shelters with his subvertisements for two years before a gallery in his native city invited him inside. Tonight Galerie Itinerrance will have LUDO’s first solo show entitled “Metal Militia”.
With a truly unique approach to social critique that serves as a cunning indictment of the advertising industry and the military industrial complex, you won’t find anything like the pretty disgust than the work of LUDO.
For further information regarding this show click here.
“All Write You Scumbags” with Reyes and Steel at Klughaus (Chinatown, NYC)
Ever the ballsy wiseguy, the Klaughaus Gallery in Manhattan continues to produce and present quality shows that challenge your possibly prejudicial pre-formed perceptions of propriety and pugnacity. This time they invited West Coast natives Reyes and Steel to exhibit at their space with a show titled “All Write You Scumbags”.
From the press release, “The New York debut for both artists and showcases a distinct chemistry cultivated over years working together as friends, creative partners and members of MSK, one of the highest regarded graffiti artist collectives in the world.” To find out what this means go to their show opening tonight.
For further information regarding this show click here.
“Dominant Species” by ROA at 941 Geary (San Francisco)
Street Artist ROA concludes his US Summer Tour 2012 in San Francisco at his own victorious opening Saturday at 941 Geary Gallery. The show is aptly called “Dominant Species” and will feature many of the cast of creatures you have grown to expect.
For further information regarding this show click here.
To read BSA’s feature on ROA this week and to see beautiful images of his work in Mexico, Africa and Cambodia earlier this year click here.
GAIA, MOMO AND MICHAEL OWEN in “Zim Zum” (Baltimore)
GAIA, MOMO AND MICHAEL OWEN are transforming the space at the Creative Alliance Gallery in Baltimore with a collaboration that promises to spill over the street and beyond. If you want to see what the trio is up to put the gameboy down and head out to the gallery for their opening tomorrow night with an exhibition titled Zim Zum.
Don’t Fret in “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Chardonnay”(Chicago)
Chicago based Street Artist Don’t Fret has a new solo show, “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Chardonnay” opening Saturday night at the Bizzare Gallery in Chicago. So if you are planning to arrive naked, BYOB and put your wallet under your armpit. Lo-fi comic book doodling that make most people look like family day at the tractor pull, Don’t Fret drawings are people you know and often dang hilarious.
For further information regarding this show click here.
Also happening this Weekend:
If you are in Tel Aviv: Israeli Street Artist and poet Know Hope is releasing a new zine titled “Others’ Truths” and he’s mounted a small exhibition of the drawings that illustrate it. This exhibition will remain open all day today until 4:00 pm. Click here for more details on this show.
The 2012 Edition of The Black River Festival in Vienna, Austria is now open. The festival has an important selection of Street Artists putting up works throughout an entire week of programs. Roster includes Blu, Evan Roth, Florian Riviere, Isaac Cordal, Mark Jenkins, and ZukClub. Click here for more details on this festival.
The film screening by Stephen Powers AKA ESPO “A Love Letter for You” is being hosted by the Joshua Liner Gallery in conjunction with their current show by the artist “A Word is Worth A Thousand Pictures”. The screening will take place tomorrow at The Tribeca Grand Hotel. The artist will be in attendance along with the director and a Q & A will follow the film. Click here for more details on this event.
“Permanence” is the title of the new group show at Space 27 Gallery in Montreal, Canada. With an ambitious line up international and Canadian artists this show aims to juxtapose the “ephemeral nature of street art with the permanence of collectible art.” From their press release. Click here for more details regarding this show.
In the spirit of Unity, we present Street Artist eL Seed in Tunisia (VIDEO)
This week there has been much news of sadness, discord, and suffering in Libya, Egypt, and Yemen. Street Artist and painter eL Seed gives us a moment to pull back and reflect on the beauty and poignancy that a religious belief system can contribute to the lives of some.
Here he creates ‘Madinati’ Calligraffiti on Jara Mosque in Gabes.
When Lucent Met Herakut by The One Point Eight (VIDEO)
“A short documentary which presents the show involving graffiti duo Herakut and the Lucent Dossier group, detailing both the rehearsal process and the final performance in a unique and different way.”
Voice Of Art “Graffiti Against The System” Presents GATS (VIDEO)
Globetrotting the Man-Made World, Listening to the Natural One
It’s sort of unprecedented to see how far ROA has gone this year, and how much work he has done. When people say that well-worn phrase “catching up with _____”, in his case you’d be out of breath. Here is a Street Artist who has very effectively escaped the street, an introvert traveling quietly in the extroverted world, with open eyes and an acute talent for observation; decoding the universe through study of the natural, and unnatural.
Today we debut new images taken by ROA from his travels in 2012 to three continents, leaving his footprints in the soil in villages and towns, studying creatures and the humans around them. As soon as he arrives at his host country he shakes hands of the people and smiles and sets his mind to observe his surroundings, taking interest in what roams free on the ground. He asks about available walls and when possible he selects a perfect one – the more imperfect the wall somehow the more perfect for him. From there it’s a simpler matter of immortalizing the critters and creatures that are all around and usually overlooked.
ROA here gives BSA readers these exclusive images of his travels to Cambodia, The Gambia, and Mexico with some of his observations, and we thank him.
MEXICO
In his second trip to Mexico City, ROA powerfully depicted struggle that commands attention across a large wall. “The snake with rats in her tail strangled. And as Jaime knows, the snake is very important for the pre-hispanic culture in Mexico,” says ROA.
“Cholula is legendary known for the 365 churches to celebrate every day another saint,” ROA says in reference to this city in Puebla. Legendary is the right word, as there are actually only about 160 chapels in the town and surrounding haciendas, but the powerful influence of the Catholic Church here may account for the impression that there is one for each day of the year.
“This was my second visit to the Makasutu Forest, The Gambia,” ROA explains as he describes getting his camera and computer stolen after his last trip – where many of the photos from that trip were lost. Thankfully he had retained some of his images from that trip, and here they are. “The choice of the animals was mostly inspired by the moment; I would walk there and see a beatle, toad, lizard, .. and just paint it. The mosquito is the insect that has the biggest impact on the people’s daily conditions and health,” he says.
Here on the invitation of TheSk8Room (Bruxelles) ROA also gave some workshops to local youth, and had the opportunity to create something special for the tower of a school in Phnom Peng called Pour un sourire d’enfant (PSE).
“Because we spent time in the jungle near Vietnam two days before, I chose to paint a firefly. After sunset we hiked up the hill and we got to see hundreds of them in the middle of the tropics. Magical!” , he exclaims. He says that the firefly is important because light pollution threatens her existence as that is the method fireflies use to communicate with one another. “They produce with their lower body a yellow/green luminescent light, and cancer researchers observing them have posited the possibility that they would could kill cancer cells. They are very magical bugs!”
“During our two days stay in the forest we visited Kep,” says ROA remembering his time in the small town near Vietnam. “It once functioned as the “French Riviera” of Cambodia, and you can see this in the villas they left behind, evidence of the former wealth of the area.” Unfortunately, many of the villas were destroyed during the time of the Khmer Rouge, he says. “Nowadays they are shelters for homeless people and for roaming animals.”
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
Chor Boogie (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Augustine Kofie (photo © Jaime Rojo)
OLEK (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Maya Hayuk (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Jaye Moon (photo © Jaime Rojo)
MOMO (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Over Under (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Feral Child (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Hellbent (photo © Jaime Rojo)
See One (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Drew Tyndell (photo courtesy artist)
