“A padlock on a bridge is considered as a proof of love in many cultures, but we all know that the key to a successful relationship is freedom,” says conceptual artist and Street Artist Aïda Gomez when talking about her simple text installation below. Just in time for Valentine’s day, a Berlin bridge gets this subtle addition, much like the underplayed interventions Aïda has done elsewhere, requiring an observant eye and a serene sense of humor.
Love is Freedom. On a padlock with a shackle passed through and opening and secured, grounded, anchored, unmoving. Rather an iron irony, don’t you think?
Aïda Gomez Love Is Freedom in Berlin. Follow her on FB @aidagomezinfo
Not only is it a lyric from a 90s pop song, it is a truth that people learn everyday to liberate themselves from attitudes and world views that they’ve accepted but now want to let go of.
Catalan Street Artist Roc Blackblock creates a cage around the head and shoulders of his protagonist for the Project 12+1 in Barcelona. He calls it “Llibera l’infant que portes dins!”, which translates as “Liberate the Child Within”.
It makes sense because many adults stopped being creative or expressing their creativity after childhood – bowing to messages from schools, parents, even religious institutions. At some point we don’t even trust our abilities to be creative anymore.
“It’s an invitation to reconnect with the aspects of ourselves that adult life and social pressures have repressed and dulled; spontaneity, creativity, fantasy, and imagination,” he says.
“It’s surreal to be on the south side of the US border,” we said last week about being in Mexico. Sorry to report that it may be even more surreal on this side.
This week New York was clobbered in a frosty white powdery art material that masked out so much, drawing attention to what remained visible. It also suddenly had new sculptural qualities, full of volume, motion, sloping curves, density, texture.
All of it was interactive. Beckoning for your participation.
Our own Jaime Rojo took off to Central Park to see and capture the myriad ways that people and animals played in, around, on top of, and underneath the snow.
Hope you’ll find some creative inspiration and enjoy this walk in the park.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Kahbahbloom: The Art and Story Telling of Ed Emberley 2. Fintan Magee / The Exile 3. Amuse.126.Big Walls 4. EWOK – MSK
BSA Special Feature: Kahbahbloom: The Art and Storytelling of Ed Emberley by Todd Mazer
“How he sustained himself artistically was by being restless and trying all these new styles and new ways and not getting stuck in the same thing,” says Caleb Neelon about the children’s book illustrator Ed Emberley with 60 years of storytelling through art– and really it is a lesson well learned by most artists.
On the other hand, it often is helpful if you have one style that you are known for, particularly when you are trying to cut through the clutter and capture people’s attention. Perhaps the best lesson is to be restless and to embrace change.
Special props to Todd Mazer for intuitive use of editing, sharp observation, and unobtrusive storytelling of his own; making this video resonate with viewers.
Fintan Magee / The Exile
“Inspired by the youth inside the Azraq refugee camp artist Fintan Magee transported the image of one young Syran girl to East Amman,” says the descriptor at the bottom of the screen. This brief glimpse gives you an idea of the scale of displacement of people in this country.
Amuse.126.Big Walls
“Large scale mural work is very powerful and captivating to its audience. To allow me to come in and to paint a predominantly graffiti-based approach and to literally plaster my name onto a side of a building is amazing,” says Chicago based Amuse.
EWOK – MSK
Ewok shows his considerable illustration skills in this commercial for an art supply manufacturer.
Rappelling down its’ side using a doubled rope coiled around the body and fixed at a higher point, NemO’s efficiently averts the complications of ladders or cherry pickers and gets right to work on this bunch of grapes.
“I have translated into an image what I perceive of this district,” he says of the Rome suburb of Primavalle, which he tells us has always had a populist, anti-fascist sentiment since it was formed in response to the gentrification of downtown.
“In the 1930s the people who lived in via della conciliazione, a street near San Pietro, were displaced from the centre of Roma and forced to move to the outskirts,” he says, as he describes this neighborhood that has hosted collectives and movements of the left wing historically.
Thus the collective nature of this bunch of grapes, one entity composed of a greater number. “A ‘bunch’ of grapes is a singular word, composed of many grapes,” he says. “I drew a leviathan where each grape has a face, a fragment of a district, an inhabitant of Primavalle.”
One of the most active artists in the streets creating in a variety of styles of work that lean toward realism and sometimes tilt into fantasy and exaggerated caricature the London born Waknine decided to do this mural on Selva de Mar to speak to the pure human factors in a refugee crisis that grips much of the developed and developing world.
The new work captures the raw human emotions of fear, desperation and distress of people afloat on rough waters. Somehow Waknine also brings dignity to the harrowing scene and references classical painting, as he has on walls in his travels to countries like Mexico, France, Israel, Germany, and England.
As some societies open their doors to help those fleeing war and imminent danger it seems unthinkable to do anything less for the least of these.
As we looked for murals and graffiti in the warm winter sun on main street and back street walls and along rails and on freight trains, we got a taste for the clever wit and aerosol talents of Mexican Street Artists. It may help that they have the amazing muralist history of Mexico to call upon.
We start this week with a huge mural in downtown Chihuahua with their namesake dog who appears to have a peyote blossom on his mind, perhaps looking for an alternate reality to help process all the alternative facts coming from up north. Is surreality here to stay?
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring: Antonio Leon, ASET, DAOR, Daniel Montes, Disko, Nino Fidencio, Rick, SPK FUK, Sebastian Gallegos, SOER and Vera Primavera.
“Social Cleansing” is a term used by Said Dokins and Lapiztola when describing the process of a gentrifying neighborhood in Mexico City where the enormous and historical public market called La Merced Market is now gradually disappearing, taking the people who made it possible with it.
Their new piece looks at the destroying of a native culture by the forces of development that feed on its unique energy and character to sell real estate and investment opportunity but in the process negate its very authorship, its right to its formidable historical place in community.
Their new wall contains the messages from Said Dokins within his particular calligraffiti style that is both communication and ornamentation. The composition also features a stencil from Lapiztola of the face of a girl, perhaps from Oaxaca, where her dress would be typical.
The states of Oaxaca and Chiapis have provided the life of La Merced for many decades – the market itself a jewel and historical institution in this neighborhood that has hosted commercial activities for more than five centuries.
“This mural was made within the project called WallDialogue2, which took place in a parking lot where several vendors from La Merced Market pass through everyday,” say the organizers of the program that took place January 20-22.
“The intentions of this project were to generate a discussion site focused on the relation between urban art and gentrification processes.”
WALL DIALOGUE 2 – Nuestro Barrio Wall Painting Jam
ATEA Topacio 25, Centro Histórico, Mexico City
January 20 – 22
Featured Artists: Billy, Blo, Johannes Mundinger, La Piztola, Libre, Mernywernz, Nelio, Pao Delfin, Said Dokins
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. NEMCO, Three Stages: Primaticcio. Part I 2. NEMCO, Three Stages: Salento. Part II 3. NEMCO, Three Stages: Tetto. Part III 4. Run AKA Giacomo Bufarini: Time Traveller Artist Man 5. Saving Banksy
6. Berlin Kidz and Grifters Code 6: Über Freaks (Trailer)
BSA Special Feature: Three Walls by Nemco in Italy
Taking a break from the hype, here are three in a row straight up graffiti painting videos, each intriguing in their own way, from Italian writer Nemco. Unpretentious style, clean lettering, flexible concepts, and a bit of retro flavor that lets you know this is a way of life, not a pose to strike. Enjoy all three.
NEMCO, Three Stages: Primaticcio. Part I
NEMCO, Three Stages: Salento. Part II
NEMCO, Three Stages: Tetto. Part III
Run AKA Giacomo Bufarini: Time Traveller Artist Man
London based Italian Street Artist RUN has completed his first book of his work, a labor that he has been talking about since we met him a year ago in Morocco.
Tristan Manco describes it as “Part travelling diary, part monograph, Time Traveller Artist Man charts the triumphs and tribulations of an imaginative soul with a passion for travel, whose worldwide voyages have become a catalyst to create art that is elemental and playful, with the ultimate goal of engaging with people from all walks of life.”
We’ll show it to you once we get a copy! It is sure to be a fine work by a fine artist.
Opening in New York Tonight February 3rd
Saving Banksy
“We paint in the streets. That’s where it belongs”, says Street Artist Ben Eine in the new “Saving Banksy” film, and that’s where the debate originates. Of course that’s never where it ends.
Berlin Kidz and Grifters Code 6: Über Freaks (Trailer)
Good Guy Boris tells us that his new film Über Freaks is going to streamed live on Facebook February 8th! Of course you need to check your local times so you make sure you don’t show up to your computer with popcorn and its already over!
08 February 2017
20p.m. (GMT+1) [ Belgium / France / Germany / Italy / Netherlands / Spain timezones ]
US (EST – New York) – Wednesday14p.m.
AUSTRALIA (AEDT – Sydney) – Thursday06a.m.
Check your city timezone here.
“Über Freaks takes place deep in the heart of Berlin, and chronicles what it’s like to be part of a close knit group, who get their kicks by roping down buildings with the barest of safety precautions, climbing buildings by way of their exteriors, and lock-picking their way through the whole of the city and its Metro stations. The film can be considered a joyride for the viewer, as they are finally granted a backstage pass to the exclusive and hectic lifestyle of the Berlin Kidz, being privy to a whole world of adrenaline and thrill seeking that occurs just outside their apartment windows.”
Walls get buffed all the time in many cities as the municipal anti-graffiti campaigns scour the streetscape for unapproved aerosol missives and get out the bucket paint or bring by the power washer.
In one Spanish city they are doing it once a month, regardless of what’s up there. At least on one wall.
The second edition of “12 +1” by a small nonprofit organization named Contorno Urbano has planned for one new artist every month to paint this wall. The nonprofit says they are composed of local artists, a social worker and an architect – all in the city of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, a municipality of a quarter million people to the immediate southwest of Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain – has been planning and executing murals for over a decade.
With a rotating roster beginning this month, the organization says it is “in an open-air art gallery” in a commercial district of the city. In a description of the event they say it “seeks to question the way we exhibit street art, and the place of these artworks in the city.”
January brought Irene López León and today we show you her new piece that incorporates elements of geometry, playing with perspective, organic elements, and a certain hypnotic quality.
Planned artists for 2017 are Iker Muro, Hosh, Miedo 12, Miquel Wert, Pati Baztán, Elbi Elem, Fernando León, Edjinn, BYG and Laura González Llaneli.
“They both see words as images,” says Shoe about graffiti writers and Medieval scribes in a 2013 interview with the BBC. His latest tome extrapolates this reverence for the letterform, an obsessive repetitive family of gestures, now often abstracted, that the artist first stumbled upon as a pre-teen in the late 1970s. Since those days he became known as graffiti artist, painter, designer, writer, calligrapher. Here is where it comes together.
Niels Shoe Meulman Shoe Is My Middle Name Lebowski Publishers, Amsterdam 2016.
“Shoe is My Middle Name” is the fourth publication by Niels Shoe Meulman and one that expands, amalgamates, solidifies his influences, mistakes, discoveries; forging a unique voice that is his own. Sometimes identified with Calligraffiti, but there is so much more to it; now the smudge and the smoke and the splatter has lead him in other directions, from supple and savvy wrist turning small scale to full-body massively immersive gestural painting.
Whether it is a push broom on a roof or a brush on mottled papyrus or the masterful swoop and turn of the squeegee, Shoe knows that there are no half steps once the liquefied pigment hits the surface. A commitment has been made.
Niels Shoe Meulman Shoe Is My Middle Name Lebowski Publishers, Amsterdam 2016.
A large coffee table book with a unifying cerulean wash / black two-tone pointillist screen motif throughout, the story of his many exploits is moderated with poetry and outtakes of reviews by or observations by the artist. In one descriptive passage about his work “The Secret Ingredient”, the Amsterdam lifer who has traveled the world says it required “a perfect mix of intuition, imagination, courage and madness.”
Carlo McCormick writes in his essay, “We honor Shoe as the great cross-pollinator who came to New York City as a kid to meet the graffiti master Dondi and brought Wild Style back to Europe, but his strength remains just how far he can still can carry this immoderate load.” Based on his path and his evolution, we’ll consider this beautiful monster to be in a mid-career retrospective and some of his most masterful work is yet to come.
Niels Shoe Meulman Shoe Is My Middle Name Lebowski Publishers, Amsterdam 2016.
“DID TUNNELS IN PARIS
THAT WALL IN BERLIN
DID ACID IN BROOKLYN
ALL WITHOUT SIN
DID ROOFTOPS IN LONDON
IN MUNICH SOME TIME
DID TRAMLINES AND STATIONS
NO LIFE WITHOUT CRIME
DID TRAINS IN THE BRONX
TAGS ON A PLANE
DID MURALS IN DELHI
ALL WITHOUT SHAME
DID LECTURES IN DUBLIN
GOT CHASED BY CHINESE
DID EXHIBITS DOWN UNDER
AND IN LOS ANGELES”
From “A Writer’s Song” by Niels Shoe Meulman
Niels Shoe Meulman Shoe Is My Middle Name Lebowski Publishers, Amsterdam 2016.
Niels Shoe Meulman Shoe Is My Middle Name Lebowski Publishers, Amsterdam 2016.
Niels Shoe Meulman Shoe Is My Middle Name Lebowski Publishers, Amsterdam 2016.
Niels Shoe Meulman Shoe Is My Middle Name Lebowski Publishers, Amsterdam 2016.
Niels Shoe Meulman Shoe Is My Middle Name Lebowski Publishers, Amsterdam 2016.
Reprinted from the original review. Spanning twelve years of studio and mural work, public interventions, installations, and collaborations, Los cimientos …Read More »
Street art welcomes all manner of materials and methods, typically deployed without permission and without apology. This hand-formed wire piece …Read More »
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