Fabio Petani may win the prize for the most murals this season; Not that there is a prize for this honor, except your skill improves and you get to meet more people at more street art festivals…
This one is at the 2nd Edition of the Artu Street Art Festival held this September in Castenaso, Italy. He calls it “NITROGEN OXIDE & ZANTEDESCHIA AETHIOPICA”.
Not that you can ever hope to compete with the Alps…
When you live in such a picturesque town like Briançon, France, your daily existence includes its grandeur. Perhaps that is why Medianeras chose to paint an equally grand Generation Z subject who fairly demands your attention as well.
“We decided to open this wall to show an empowered and defiant youth,’ said the artist duo of Analí Chanquia and Vanesa Galdeano. With the intention, they say, of presenting a “more equal and fair society in this windy place with violet horizons that disappear in the clouds,” the artists painted for this festival that began in 2018 here called “Eternelles Crapulles”.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week!
As the graffiti and street art high season draws to a close, we remark on the stunning array of new faces on the New York scene this year, as well as a large crop of maturing talents from the last decade or so. The length of the cycle for artists working on the street varies some, but we’ve been around enough to see many of the early 2000s stars fade away or move on to other things. The voice of this new generation is as challenging as ever and perhaps more savvy in many ways. Still, it’s good to see the re-appearance this month of folks like Hera in New York – a talent whose global and studio escapades have made her a revered street artist over about two decades.
Our thanks to all the artists of all persuasions and longevity for giving voice and character to our public spaces.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Queen Andrea, Praxis,CRKSHNK, Lexi Bella, Danielle Mastrion, Homesick, Hera, Panic, Seo, Insane 51, Habibi, Didi, Keops, OSK, AAA, EXR, RJG Rock, L.O.U.R.S., Nohemi, Hazard One, and Emesa.
Berlin is possibly most famous among the youthful demographic for the organic illegal graffiti and street art that covers entire neighborhoods – something that has stayed true for decades. Additionally, real estate companies and private curation groups have been sponsoring large murals on housing buildings throughout the city for the last decade.
Today we have the new one in Marzahn-Hellersdorf on Stendaler Straße by the artist Gera 1 from Athens, Greece. A graffiti writer since 2009, Gera 1 graduated with a Fine Arts degree in Thessaloniki, and has painted large-scale works in Paris, Milan, and elsewhere in Europe. The multilayer image features a female form awash in a dream of CMYK, the principal colors used by printers everywhere. The color palette is a signature of the artist, who favors “glitch art”, realistic portraits, and abstract forms.
Our thanks to Moritz at Wandelism.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening:
1. New Neighbors – First Impressions. A film by Yoo Lee via The New Yorker
2. The Doodle House
3. Beyond Walls Tour 2022
It’s easy to judge a book by its cover. We do it all the time. And we are always right.
New Neighbors – First Impressions. A film by Yoo Lee via The New Yorker
The Doodle House
It’s animated, it covers the whole house, and he keeps his pants on.
Other than that, you may continue on with your aesthetic associations with Keith Haring a few decades before in New York.
Also, someone needs to curate a doodle exhibition. There are many of these doodlers now, especially over the last decade.
Beyond Walls Tour 2022
Behind the scenes at Beyond Walls in Massachusetts, courtesy Tost Films.
As the Northern Hemisphere is heading into autumn, we bring you two more blasts of summer’s rich jewel tones from central Gothenburg in Sweden. UK Muralist Sophie Mess favors pleasant domestically flowering botanicals and slices them up diagonally in a way you may associate with Berlin’s James Bullough’s portraits or Li-Hill’s sculptures. Decidedly more targeted to the House & Garden set, here Mess creates a decorative mural duo for tourists and shoppers in the courtyard of Magasinsgatan, commissioned by gallery/agency Artscape.
Deconstruct. Decontextualize. Words that artists like to use when describing the techniques and intellectual positioning of their works.
Here we find SpY doing a lot of both.
First, he pulls the humble barrier tape away from its original context – which is to provide a visual warning to stay away from a potentially dangerous place. Then he deconstructs the actual roll of tape, turning it from long continuous spans of red and white into a sort of fringe field hanging from cables just above your head.
With the addition of waterfront breezes and your gentle dances beneath, this installation of “Barrier Tape” in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, is a fully interactive kinetic and sound sculpture. The 1,600-meter installation is drawing a lot of attention to this location because it is bright and makes a rustling sound reminding you perhaps of leaves. It also brandishes a sense of emergency or danger, but you’re not sure why.
“Inside the piece, the repeated element takes the viewer into a transitory state of disorientation,” says the artist Spy.
“The pieces of tape swing in unison with the wind, creating a wave-like motion throughout the composition and generating an intense, random soundscape.”
SpY would like to thank “r1” for his inspiration and support.
Site-specific installations are sometimes very impactful, especially when they transform space. Street artist and public artist SpY capitalizes on the slow choreography of twenty large discs rising and falling in concert here at the Weapons Factor in La Vega in Oviedo, Spain.
For SpY, every space can be a workshop and laboratory. Seeing this kinetic interplay of the simplest of shapes, their edges catching the crimson light keeps changing and reinventing, a bionic conveyance. Add the soundscape, and it changes again as it meets light patterns while creating new ones.
“Visitors can navigate around and across a living artwork, actively engaging in a unique, multidimensional experience of hypnotic and immersive qualities, marked by the scale of the piece within the imposing space of the warehouse,” says SpY.
LINK Fest
Circuito de Experiencias Culturales Insólitas
Video: Mind the Film, Ruben P Bescos
Music: Kotmatsu
Production: Datatron
Technical Production : Jorge Cañon
Programming: Natxe
DMX Winches: Wahlberg Motion Design
Ja Morant, James Harden, Trae Young, Luka Doncic? Yes, they are all premier ball players this season in the NBA. But at the pinnacle of this survey of top athletes, says the sons of the French street artist Tuco Wallach, stands the 34-year-old Stephen Curry.
It’s agreed.
Regardless of your socio-economic status, the street still meets you where you are at, and Tuco put this installation in his neighborhood as a tribute to entertaining athleticism, corporate sport media, and the celebrity heroism that basketball players now focus on. October starts the NBA 2022/2023, says Tuco, and “my two sons are very (very) happy.”
What better way to include home life with his street art than to feature superstar shooter Stephen Curry with one of his signature Teddy Bears?
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week!
Well, it was all going well until you came along, Ian. No offense dude but it’s like you walk around with a cloud over your head. The negativity from this hurricane has left us feeling blue (or grey) all weekend – just murky, moody skies so dark that you have to turn a lamp on to see in your apartment in the middle of the day. And few graffiti stalwarts will go out in this weather to perform aesthetic acts of mark-making, though there are exceptions.
Meanwhile in sunny northern Mexico in the heart of the desert city called Chihuahua, our editor of photography, Jaime Rojo, found a bounty of new stuff in an abandoned factory. He also met a lot of new friends (see this weeks final image.) Que Estilo!
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: TCK Crew, Gang, CEN, Grer, Lords, Ickes, Skiee, Esza, Loupe, Rosko, Kosmo, Dementes, KAY, EPC, TCK MEA, and Suly.
One may be able to think and create abstractly, and there is something to admire in that fact. Translating your singular, refracted vision into a 400-square meter mural in a way that supercharges the architecture, the immediate built environment, and the minds of passersby – that requires serious muscle, self-discipline, and a deep commitment.
The Turin-based illustrator and muralist came to Bologna for the local Park Life project – a multi-faceted arts and culture network of festivals geared toward the Millenial and Gen Z demographic – and decided that his theme would be “Carosel” (carousel). In it, he appears to be referencing his own bemused observation of arts, science, pop, and humanities culture from the perspective of an artist who has done a substantial quantity of traveling over these past years.
“Carosel presents a large floating urban agglomeration with intersected architectural volumes that want to give the idea of abstract landscapes but at the same time recall some existing cities,” he tells us. This interpretive lens allows us to read his visual diary if you will.
It also is meant to speak to the diverse audience who comprise the Bologna metropolitan area of about a million people that is home to the world’s oldest university. Of great significance to Etnik’s “Carosel”, it also is home to many immigrant groups and 150 nationalities.
“Bologna is inhabited by people of different ethnic backgrounds, and therefore the artist’s game includes proposing multi-ethnic architecture, textures, and details,” he says. During his creative process, Etnik tells us that he hopes to engage with the viewer emotionally through his intermixing of elements, references, and considered tonality.
“The wall is immersive thanks to the grandeur of the central block that invites the viewer into the façade, making him feel part of it.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening:
1. INDIGENO – Torino 2022 / Via Il Cerchio E Le Gocce
2. Procez – Berlin Metro Graffiti via Spray Daily
3. The End of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch / The Ocean Cleanup
Oh the self-possessed, funky style and ease that the Italians have as they stroll through this video with a dirty soul guitar twang and a punchy drum track laying the backdrop for them. With each of this year’s inaugural INDIGENO Festival artists in Torino giving a brief narrative about their work, the camera pulls, sweeps, floats, zooms and shudders with equal amounts of smoothness and swagger. Hopefully, the mural art lives up to the dramatic presentation. It does.
INDIGENO – Torino 2022 / Via Il Cerchio E Le Gocce
Procez – Berlin Metro Graffiti via Spray Daily
A video postcard from Berlin and their signature yellow public metro trains, each festooned by a different writer against a dark party bass beat. The interspersals of comedic bits of video make it human, or, in the case of two pigeons going at it on a train platform in broad daylight, animal.
The End of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch / The Ocean Cleanup
Let this mark the beginning of the end for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch… Yes, there is the 3rd World War well underway, but we can still focus on positive solutions to human-made problems. Can you?
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY