“It was the very first time that I painted on a rooftop!,” says French-Swiss land artists Saype. It was so amazing.”
In a project commissioned for the “Urbain.es” exhibition curated by Magda Danysz, the large scale sprayer appears to be following a thread in Le Parc Barbieux in the south of France. “It was a beautiful opportunity to create an artwork and to create link between people there,” he says.
In addition to addressing a common narrative, thematically curated group shows can draw attention to contrasts in style and present something that unified to the visitor. A new women-centered project opening at the end of the month in Roubaix, France, aims to draw similarities and differences among a variety of street artists to create a dialogue about how women are depicted in public space.
Using new and borrowed art pieces, curator and art dealer Magda Dansyz fills a 15,000 square foot exhibition space at La Condition Publique, a culture factory that inhabits an historic former wool and cotton processing facility and is now a venue for artistic creation. “I have been working for a year now about the place and representation of women in the public space through the light of street art practices,” she says about Urbain.es and the nearly 30 artists whose work is here.
They span perhaps 40 years of street practice from risk-taking activists to self-promoters leveraging activism as a brand builder, to more subtle artworks in the public sphere that raise incisive questions about perceptions of women in society.
“In a variety of forms, the exhibition presents in situ works, original art pieces lent by the artists or private and public collections, as well as documentary testimonials retracing historical urban performances,” says a text from the organizers. Exciting highlights include the inclusion of works by true old-school billboard activists like the Guerrilla Girls who for decades have been confronting art institutions for systemic sexism, the 1970/80s NY graff writer Lady Pink who painted trains in a male dominated subculture, and Yseult YZ Digan, whose painterly depictions of women represent a quieter tribute to the strength and steel of women that appears through many cultures, often overlooked.
Artistes I Artists
Yseult YZ Digan, eL Seed, Guerilla Girls, Maya Hayuk, Icy and Sot, Invader, Mark Jenkins et Sandra Fernandez, JR, Kubra Khademi, Lady Pink, Madame, Miss.Tic, Miss Van, Mode 2, Robert Montgomery, Eko Nugroho, Obvious, Quik, Edmond Marie Rouffet, Magda Sayeg, Saype, Swoon, T-Kid, Aya Tarek, Amalia Ulman, Zevs
URBAIN.ES
Exposition collective sous le commissariat de Magda Danysz
Group Show curated by Magda Danysz
Du 31 mars au 24 juillet 2022
From March 31st to July 24th, 2022
Click HERE for more information and a complete preview of the artworks.
La Condition Publique, Roubaix, France
RSVP: laconditionpublique.com
Human rights, unjust imprisonment, women’s equality, the plight of migrants and, the threats of climate change. The many pitfalls of unbridled capitalism.
These have been issues that Icy & Sot have been focusing on since we first knew of them, and later when we welcomed them to our city – and ever since. Undeterred by repression of their home country, they moved here to Brooklyn to pursue a new life, only to find that the fundamentals of human rights and the rule of law are globally, constantly in need of defense.
Without exception, their work has remained focused and insistent as it has changed venue from street to gallery. Those same values are unwavering as the materials have shifted from aerosol to barbed wire and iron, from stencil and mural to rigid sculpture. Whether their deliberately unflashy pieces are mounted against a Californian desert landscape, an expanse of Rockaway Beach, or floating a Georgian river, the world plays an integral roll in the success and the message of their artworks – an ultimate hewing to the street art axiom that physical context is paramount to the message of a piece.
As Icy and Sot begin their new Familiar / Stranger exhibition at Danysz gallery in Paris, they are unbowed by their discovery as fine artists, unimpressed with the charade, immune to unnecessary artifice, mindful of the world as it has presented itself. The work, some of it brand new, quietly yells. The canvasses are spectacular; a product of hand-made tools and hand-pressed paint in such a streaming plaintive state of consciousness that it will never be purely aesthetic despite its patterned abstraction. The work is, like its authors, authentic.
“I want you to panic. I want you to act as if your house was on fire.”
– Greta Thunberg
The exhibition includes a set of video with an installation, as well as their more recent works ranging from sculpture to paintings all centered around the artists’ engagement for a more conscious world.
From the press release; “As writer Sasha Bogojev puts it, ‘In some way turning Greta’s inspiring words into poetic reality, Icy and Sot built a frame of an archetypal home and set it on fire. Allowing for the untouched surrounding nature to be seen between the blazing framework of the house, the artists suggest looking at the wider picture in which the Earth is our only home. The video shows the reversed footage of their installation being swallowed by flames and crumbling to the ground, creating an illusion of burning pieces of wood rising up and forming the familiar structure. With Greta’s voice in the background calling upon civil disobedience and rebellion, the video has a compelling incentive undertone reminding us that the change is possible if we put pressure on those in power.’ ”
Saturday, February 12, 2022
From 3 to 7PM
On view from February 12, to April 9, 2022
Danysz gallery
78 rue Amelot
Paris (Marais)
M° Saint-Sébastien-Froissart
238
138
45
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
