Welcome to BSA Images of the Week – this week from Wynwood Walls in Miami, which each year Goldman Global Arts invites a slate of artists to artistically collaborate by providing them with the opportunity to paint on the walls of the compound. The artists created new pieces in the weeks leading up to Miami Art Basel and debuted them this week. Many of the artists were in attendance during the events and attended the celebration dinner given by the Goldman family as well. Martha Cooper and Nika Kramer were invited to provide the documentation of the process and the completed works.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Add Fuel, Aiko, Bordalo II, David Flores, Ernesto Maranje, Farid Rueda, Greg Mike, Hiero Veiga, Joe Iurato, Kai, Kayla Mahaffey, Mantra, Quake, and Scott Froschauer.
The opportunity to be inspired by visual culture is indeed endless on the street, which explains the 22-year career of Brooklyn’s Faile, the street art duo who has parlayed their practice into prints, collage, video, sculpture, paintings, NFT’s, galleries, and museums.
As they keep the momentum from a new direction they pioneered last year at Magda Danysz in Paris, the Patricks continue their endless exploration of icons; pop, punk, and religious. Now, perhaps even more impressively, the artists are applying the model of collage to painted techniques, textures, proportions, even dimensions, for their new show at Goldman Global Arts Gallery at Wynwood Walls in the Wynwood District of Miami.
Now considered a cornerstone of the nextgen of street art that turned the century, the duo has never stopped innovating or experimenting with ways to flatten the hierarchy of imagery – perhaps predicting the modern age. Whether the source or storyline is authentic or artificial is of little difference – if the image and the technique resonate, it’s worthy of re-mixing, endlessly.
In “Endless”, we see that it is not just images that need recombining, it’s techniques of art-making do as well. New forms of borrowing and recontextualization means that canvasses may feature references to Warhol’s last screenprinting methods of the 80s happily alongside photorealistic fruit and juicy lips, 2-D cartoon cut-outs, and gradient fills and fonts from your favorite 80s music tour t-shirt.
It’s true, this work honors the skewed norms of modern heroes of deconstruction – Richard Hamilton, Jacques Villeglé, even Kanye West – but Faile’s unique fluidity and mastery among different media again are challenging you to reach further. In an era when thousands of daily images overwhelm your social feed and respected institutions transform before your eyes in cheerful and sometimes discomfiting ways, this exhibition appears very contemporary.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
