‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.’
~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
That’s the quote Seattle’s Christopher Derek Bruno says he kept revisiting during the painting of this new project that fairly washes the hate right out of your heart. We can’t help but be reminded of huge expanses covered in colorful washes by Risk and Shepard Fairey a few years ago in Miami or the massive swimming pool Hot Tea did in New York in 2015.
A private commission for the SoDo Track program, businesses interests invest in public artworks to attract people to this section of the city along a section of light rail and “to address chronic graffiti and beautify the district,” according to the SoDo Business Improvement Area website.
The former industrial sector of mills and manufacturing later turned to warehouses like this before the shipping container industry came along and now the area boasts big box home improvement businesses and a mélange of cross-industry interests – and artists of course.
You may be interested to sit atop one of these rooftops to watch Monday’s solar eclipse, which Seattle is supposed to catch 92% of and while there you may consider that color theory and science also entered into Bruno’s calculation of this piece of public art.
He calls it ‘Exterior Intervention 1 : angle of incidence’ and says that it “is a site specific composition based on the use of light as a means to detect and decipher motion (Red shift / Blue Shift). This common measure for the direction of a galaxy/star/object/particle as it moves through space and time realized in the form of 21 values from blue to yellow, and finally red across the longest side of the site.”
If the science isn’t what impresses you most, consider the quantities: 10,000 square feet of surface, nearly 100 gallons of paint, and 10 days painting on a roof. It will be interesting to see the colors moving here for some time to come.
The Moscow Manege Hosts International and Local Street Artists for a Biennale
Moscow presents a Street Artist’s exhibition, but the streets have almost none.
When Street Art and it’s associated cousins move inside the possible outcomes are many. With exhibitions like this you are seeing urban becoming very contemporary.
The Artmossphere Biennale jump-starts the debate for many about how to best present the work of Street Artists and organizers here in Moscow chose a broad selection of curators from across a spectrum of private, commercial, academic and civically-inspired perspectives to present a solid range of artists from the graffiti and Street Art world inside a formal hall.
To be clear, unless it is illegal and on the street, it is not graffiti nor Street Art. That is the prevailing opinion about these terms among experts and scholars of various stripes and it is one we’re comfortable with. But then there are the commercial and cultural influences of the art world and the design industries, with their power to reshape and loosen terms from their moorings. Probably because these associated art movements are happening and taking shape before our eyes and not ensconced in centuries of scholarship we can expect that we will continue to witness the morphing our language and terminologies, sometimes changing things in translation.
Definitions aside, when you think of more organic Street Art scenes which are always re-generating themselves in the run-down abandoned sectors of cities like Sao Paulo, New York, Melbourne, Paris, Mexico City, London, and Berlin, it is interesting to consider that this event takes place nearly on the grounds of the Kremlin under museum like security.
An international capital that ensures cleanly buffed walls within hours of the appearance of any unapproved Street Art or graffiti, Moscow also boasts a growing contingent of art collectors who are young enough to appreciate the cultural currency of this continuously mutating hybrid of graffiti, hip hop, DIY, muralism, and art-school headiness. The night clubs and fashionable kids here are fans of events like hip-hop and graffiti jams, sometimes presented as theater and other times as “learning workshops” and the like.
Plugging into this idea of street and youth culture is not a singular fascination – there is perhaps an association with the rebellious anti-authoritarian nature of unregulated art in the streets that fuels the interest of many. With graffiti and hip-hop culture adoption as a template, newer expressions of Street Art culture are attractive as well with high profile artists with rebel reputations are as familiar in name here as in many cities. New festivals and events sometimes leverage this renegade free-spirit currency for selling tourism and brands and real estate, but here there also appears to be an acute appreciation for its fine art expression – urban contemporary art.
MOSCOW’S MANEGE AND “DEGENERATE ART”
So ardent is the support for Artmossphere here that a combination of public and private endorsements and financial backing have brought it to be showcased in a place associated with high-culture and counter-culture known as the Moscow Manege (Мане́ж). The location somehow fits the rebellious spirit that launched these artists even if its appearance wouldn’t lead you to think that.
The 19th century neo-classical exhibition hall stands grandly adjacent to Red Square and was built as an indoor riding school large enough to house a battalion of 2,000 soldiers during the 1800s. It later became host to many art exhibitions in the 20th century including a famous avant-garde show in 1962 that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev famously derided as displaying ‘degenerate’ art.
One of the artists whose work was criticized, painter and sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, challenged the label defiantly and won accolades afterward during his five decade career that followed, including receiving many awards and his work being collected worldwide by museums. Russian President Vladimir Putin is quoted as calling him “a recognised master and one of the best contemporary sculptors”. In January of this year at the age of 90, Neizvestny’s return to Menage featured an extensive exhibition. He passed away August 9th (The Moscow Times), only weeks before Artmossphere opened.
In some kindred spirit many of these artists at Artmossphere have done actual illegal work on the streets around the world during their respective creative evolutions, and graffiti and Street Art as a practice have both at various times been demonized, derided, dismissed and labeled by critics in terms synonymous with “degenerate”.
A CLEAN CITY
“Moscow is mostly very clean,” says Artmossphere co-founder and Creative Director Sabine Chagina, who walks with guests during a sunny afternoon in a busy downtown area just after the opening. “But we do have some good graffiti crews,” she says as we round the corner from the famous Bolshoi Theater and soon pass Givenchy and Chanel and high-end luxury fashion stores. Shortly we see a mural nearby by French artist Nelio, who painted a lateral abstracted geometric, possibly cubist, piece on the side of a building here in 2013 as part of the LGZ Festival.
If there was graffiti here in Moscow, it was not on full display very readily in this part of town. In driving tours, rides on the extensive metro train system, and in street hikes across the city a visitor may find that much of the illegal street art and graffiti common to other global capitals is illusive due to a general distaste for it and a dedicated adherence to buffing it out quickly.
For a pedestrian tourist Moscow appears in many ways as fully contemporary and architecturally rich as any international world-class metropolis. One of the cleanest places you’ll visit, the metro is almost museum-like in some instances; the historic districts spotless, public fountains, famed statues of important historical figures. All is efficiently ordered and – a welcome surprise – most public space is free of advertisements interrupting your view and your thoughts.
Come to think of it, the sense of commercial-celebrity media saturation that is present in other cities doesn’t appear to permeate the artists psyche here at the Biennale – so there’s not much of the ironic Disney-Marilyn-supermodel-Kardashian-skewering of consumerism and shallowness in this exhibition that you may find in other Urban Art events.
Also, unlike a Street Art-splattered show in London for example that may rudely mock Queen Elizabeth or art in New York streets that present Donald Trump styled as a pile of poo and Hillary Clinton as Heath Ledger’s Joker, we didn’t see over-the-top Putin satires either. So personality politics don’t seem directly addressed in this milieu. According to some residents there was an outcropping of huge festival murals by Street Artists here just a few years ago but more recently they have been painted over with patriotic or other inspiring murals, while others have been claimed for commercial interests.
Starved for some gritty street scenes, it is all the more interesting to see the one live mural painting that we were able to catch – a 6-story red-lined op-art tag by the French graffiti writer L’Atlas. Far from Manege, placed opposite a cineplex in what appears to be a shopping mall situated far from the city’s historical and modern centers, our guide tells us half-jokingly that he is not sure that we are still in Moscow.
Here L’Atlas says that he has painted his bar-code-like and cryptic nom-de-plume with an assistant on a cherry picker for a few days and he says that no one has stopped to ask him about it, neither to comment or criticize. Actually one man early one morning returning home from a disco did engage him briefly, but it was difficult to tell what he was talking about as he may have had a few drinks.
This lack of public commentary is mainly notable because in other cities the comments from passersby can be so ubiquitous that artists deliberately wear stereo headphones to prevent interruption and to be more productive. Sometimes the headphones are not actually playing music.
This Street Art Biennale nonetheless is gaining a higher profile among Urban Art collectors and its associated art dealers and the opening and later auction reaches directly to this audience. Included this year with the primary “Invisible Walls” exhibition are satellite events in association with local RuArts Gallery, Tsekh Belogo at Winzavod, and the Optika Pavilion (No. 64) at VDNKh.
The opening night event itself is wide and welcoming, a mostly youthful and populist affair with celebratory speeches and loosely organized group photos and an open bar. Added together with a press conference, a live DJ, virtual reality headsets, interactive artworks, major private business sponsors, government grants, ministers of culture, gallerists, and quirkily fashionable art fans, this is a polished presentation of a global culture that is filtered through the wide lense of the street.
Perhaps because the exhibition hall is a cavernous rectangle with exposed beams on the ceiling and many of the constructed white walls that mimic vendor booths, it has the air of an art fair. There are thankfully no salespeople pacing back and forth watching your level of interest. People tend to cluster before installations and talk, laugh, share a story, pose for a selfie.
The theme seems very appropriately topical as geopolitical, trade-related, social, digital, and actual walls appear to be falling down rapidly today while the foundations of new ones are taking shape. Catalyzed perhaps by the concept and practices of so-called “globalization” – with its easy flow of capital and restricted flow of humans, we are all examining the walls that are shaping our lives.
With 60+ international artists working simultaneously throughout this massive hall, newly built walls are the imperative for displaying art, supporting it, dividing it. These are the visible ones. With so many players and countries represented here, one can only imagine that there are a number of invisible walls present as well.
The theme has opened countless interpretations in flat and sculptural ways, often expressed in the vernacular of fine art with arguable nods to mid-20th century modernists, folk art, fantasy, representational art, abstract, conceptual, computer/digital art, and good old traditional graffiti tagging. Effectively it appears that when Street Art and graffiti artists pass the precipice into a multi-disciplinary exhibition such as this, one can reframe Urban/Street as important tributaries to contemporary art – but will they re-direct the flow or be subsumed within it?
The work often can be so far removed from street practice that you don’t recognize it as related.
Aside from putting work up in contested public space without permission and under cover, an average visitor may not see a common thread. These works run aesthetic to the conceptual, painterly to the sculptural, pure joy and pure politics. But then, that is we began to see in the streets as well when the century turned to the 21st and art students in large numbers in cities like New York and London and Berlin skipped the gatekeepers, taking their art directly to the public.
Perhaps beneath the surface or just above it, there is a certain anarchistic defiance, a critique of social, economic, political issues, a healthy skepticism toward everyone and everything that reeks of hypocritical patriarchal power structures. Perhaps we’re just projecting.
Looking over the 60+ list of names, it may be striking to some that very few are people of color, especially in view of the origins of the graffiti scene. Similarly, the percentage of women represented is quite small. We are familiar with this observation about Urban Art in general today, and this show mirrors the European and American scene primarily, with notable exceptions such as Instagrafite’s home-based Brazilian crew of 4 artists. As only one such sampling of a wide and dispersed scene, it is not perhaps fair to judge it by artists race, gender, or background, but while we speak of invisible walls it is worth keeping our eyes on as this “scene” is adopted into galleries, museums, and private collections.
Following are some of the artists on view at Artmossphere:
ASKE
Certainly Moscow native ASKE is gently mocking our mutated modern practices of communicating with his outsized blocked abstraction of a close couple riveted to their respective electronic devices, even unaware of one another.
Warsaw based NeSpoon creates a sculpture of another couple. Heroically presenting her vision of what she calls the iconic “Graffiti Writer” and “Street Art Girl”, they face the future with art instruments in hand ready to make their respective marks. She says her work is emblematic of a permanent financial insecurity for a generation she calls the “PRECARIAT”.
“ ‘Precariat’ is the name of the new emerging social class,” says curator, organizer, and NeSpoon’s partner Marcin Rutkiewicz when talking about the piece during the press conference. “These are young people living without a predictable future, without good jobs, without social security. It’s a class in the making and probably these people don’t have any consciousness or global unity of interest. But they are the engines of protest for people all over the world – like Occupy Wall Street, Gezi Park in Turkey, or the Arab Spring.”
The artist developed the sculpture specifically for this exhibition and planned it over the course of a year or so. Born of a social movement in Poland by the same name, the sculpture and its sticker campaign on the street represent “a kind of protest against building walls between people who are under the same economical and social situation all over the world,” says Rutkiewicz.
LI-HILL
Artist Li-Hill says his piece “Guns, Germs, and Steel” directly relates to the divisions between civilizations due to a completely uneven playing field perpetuated through generations. Inspired by the 1997 trans-disciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond, Li-Hill says the Russian sculptural group called “The Horse Tamers” represents mankind’s “ability to harness power of the natural world and to be able to manipulate it for its advantage.”
“The horse is one of the largest signifiers and is a catalyst for advancement in society because it has been for military use, for agriculture, for transportation,” he says. “It was the most versatile of the animals and the most powerful.” Here he painted a mirror image, balanced over a potential microbial disaster symbol, and he and the team are building a mirrored floor to “give it this kind of infinite emblem status.”
Afloat in the middle of some of these walled areas M-City from Poland is choosing to be more direct thematically in his three dimensional installation of plywood, plaster, aerosol and bucket paint, and machine blown insulation.
“It is an anti-war piece,” he says, and he speaks about the walls between nations and a losing battle of dominance that ensures everyone will be victim.”
“It’s kind of a monster who destroys arms,” he says of this temporary sculpture with a lording figure crushing tanks below.
“He is destroying the tanks but at the same time he is also a destroyer – so it’s a big circle. Nothing is positive that can come out of this. There is always someone bigger.” He says the piece is inspired by the political situations in Europe today and the world at large.
HOTTEA
Minneapolis based HOTTEA usually does very colorful yarn installations transforming a huge public space, but for Artmossphere he is taking the conceptual route. The walk-in room based on the Whack-A-Mole game presents holes which a visitor can walk under and rise above.
Visitors/participants will experience the physical separation of space, and perhaps contemplate facing one another and interacting or ignoring one another. It is something he says he hopes will draw attention to how many walls we have allowed ourselves to distract from human interactions.
Englands’ Sick Boy calls his project The Rewards System, where guests are invited to climb a ladder over a brick wall and descend down a slide into a darkened house, setting off a series of sensors that activate a variety of multisensory lights and tantalizing patterns. After landing and being rewarded the visitor is forced to exit on hands and knees through a too-small square door.
“The concept of the show is about invisible walls so I was thinking about there being barriers in your life and I thought about the reward of endorphins one experiences for achieving a task – a small amount of endorphins. So I thought I would build a house that signifies the reward system,” he explains.
Atlanta/Seattle based Derek Bruno reached back to the Leonid Brezhnev years and into Moscow’s Gorky Park for his series of site specific installations based on Soviet Cement Fence type PO-2. The iconic fence was re-created in a nearby studio and Bruno shot photographs of his 10-15 minute “interventions” in the park itself, revisiting a field of design called “technical aesthetics.”
In a statement Bruno explains “Since the end of the Soviet Union, the iconic fence has become a persistent and ever present reminder of former delineations of space; while new forms of boundaries shape the digital and sociopolitical landscapes. “
REMI ROUGH
Remi Rough is known for his smartly soaring abstract geometry in painted murals and smaller scale works, and for Moscow he wanted to strip it back to the basics, approaching a white box with one undulating graphic composition.
“My idea was that Moscow’s a bit ‘over the top’,” he says, and he decided to strip back the audacity and go for simplicity, which actually takes courage.
“I said ‘you know what?’ – I want to do something with the cheapest materials you can possibly get. These two pieces literally cost 3000 rubles ($50). It’s made of felt, it’s like a lambs wool. I think they use it for flooring for construction.” Depending on the angle, the pink blotted material may translate as a swath of otherworldly terrain or a metaphorical bold vision with all the hot air let out.
“I wanted to do something peaceful and calming and use natural materials – something that’s different from what I usually do – but I use the folds in the fabric and the pink color – two things that I usually use a lot.”
ALEXEY LUKA
Moscow’s Alexey Luka is also challenging himself to stretch creatively by taking his wall collage installations of found wood and converting them into free-standing sculptures.
“For this biennale I tried to make something different so now I am going from the assemblages to 3-D.” The constructed media is warm and ordered, reserved but not without whimsy.
“My work is made from found wood – I use it with what I found on the street and my shapes and my graphics – so it’s kind of an experiment with three dimensions,” and he confirms that most of this wood is sourced here in Moscow.
We ask him about the number of eyes that peer out from his installation. Perhaps these eyes are those of Muscovites? “They are just like observers,” he says.
Torino’s Mimmo recreated the Moscow Olympic Village from the 1980 games in miniature presented as on a plainly brutalist platform. The sculpture is austere in detail on the hulking towers save for the tiny graffiti tags, throwies, rollers, extinguisher tags, and the like at the bases and on the roofs.
Curator Christian Omodeo tells us that Mimmo recreated the massive village based on his direct study of the site as it stands today; a housing project that has hundreds of families — and a hip-hop / graffiti scene as well.
It is striking that the scale reduces the impact of the graffiti – yet when experienced at eye-level it retains a potency. Even so, by recasting the relationship between viewer and mark-making, this graffiti actually seems “cute” because of its relative size to the viewer.
BRAD DOWNEY
Brad Downey and Alexander Petrelli hi-jacked the opening of the Biennale by circulating within the exhibit as a gallery with artworks for sale. With Downey performing as a street-huckster pushing his own art products, Mr. Patrelli showcased new Downey photo collages and drawings inside his mobile “Overcoat Gallery”
A charming Moscow art star / gallerist / performance artist, Mr. Patrelli is also a perennial character at openings and events in the city, by one account having appeared at 460 or so events since 1992 with his flashing overcoat. The artworks also feature Patrelli, completing a self-referential meta cycle that continued to circle the guests at the exhibition.
International artists participating in the Artmossphere Biennale 2016 include: Akacorleone, Alex Senna, Brad Downey, Chu (Doma), Orilo (Doma), Claudio Ethos, Demsky, Christopher Derek Bruno, Filippo Minelli, Finok, Galo, Gola Hundun, Hot Tea, Jaz, Jessie and Katey, Johannes Mundinger, L’Atlas, LiHill, LX One, M-city, TC, Mario Mankey, Martha Cooper, Miss Van, Nespoon, Millo, Pablo Benzo, Pastel, Paulo Ito, Proembrion, Remed, Remi Rough, Rub Kandy, Run, Sepe, Sickboy, Smash 137, Sozyone Gonsales, SpY, The London Police, Trek Matthews, Wes 21.
This article is a result of a Brooklyn Street Art partnership with Urban Nation Museum For Urban Contemporary Art in Berlin and was originally published at Urban Nation Museum For Urban Contemporary Art
Traditional letterforms are melting and straightening and refracting and layering and abstracting and slicing into geometric forms tonight in Portland Oregon as “Three The Hard Way” opens with men who came up through graffiti and embraced a new enthusiasm for this modern visual vocabulary.
Hard in this case doesn’t refer to their individual dispositions but it may refer to the amount of effort and skill they each have put into building a body of work, and a point of view. Naturally it also name-checks Hard-Edge painting and the surety and confidence you have to have to make choices in your art.
So here you are, some fresh images of some of the new works on display tonight by Augustine Kofie, Jerry Joker Inscoe, Christopher Derek Bruno, three artists whose large scale works on the street have taken different directions over the last decades but now all have led to this one place.
Lucky folk in Portland will meet all three if they go tonight. Congratulations to the curator who possesses an architectural sensibility, Sven Davis, for creating this sharp focus on dimension, form, composition, and space. This trio smartly soars.
BROOKLYN! Jay-Z opens the new stadium in Brooklyn tonight with a lot of fanfare – and if you don’t have tickets just have a blast in the hundreds of studio spaces and gallery shows and “in the street” installations and performances starting tonight at the Dumbo Arts Festival that brings thousands coursing through the neighborhood over the next three days.
Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and Quincy Jones. (VIDEO)
Here’s a clean way to see writing on Brooklyn walls and to practice your lyrical skillz.
1. Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and Quincy Jones. (VIDEO)
2. Nuart 2012 Begins in Norway
3. NY ART BOOK FAIR at PS1 (LIC, Queens)
4. DUMBO ARTS FESTIVAL 2012 (Brooklyn)
5. Futurism 2.0 at Blackall Studios (London)
6. JAZ “Metodologias del Discurso” (Argentina)
7. Narcelio Grud “Paraphernalia” (VIDEO)
8. Daytime Bombing with HNR (VIDEO)
Nuart 2012 Begins in Norway
Named the Cultural Capital of Europe a few years back, Stavanger has remarkably open minds and has embraced a select slice of the Street Art scene that is displayed this time of year via large mural installations, indoor shows, and speakers. NUART was born here and it set the standards for many Street Art Festivals that have followed since NUiART first opened its walls to visiting international Street Artists in the early 2000s. NUART 2012 opened Thursday with a full day of activities related to NUART PLUS and it will continue thorughout the weekend with the opening of Tout Scene on Saturday. The list of participating artists this year include: AAKASH NIHALANI (US), DOLK (NO), EINE (UK), RON ENGLISH (US), SABER (US), HOWNOSM (US), MOBSTR (UK) NIELS SHOW MEULMAN (NL), JORDAN SEILER (US), THE WA (FR), SICKBOY (UK).
For more information on all activities and schedules regarding NUART PLUS click here.
For more information regarding Saturday’s Opening of Tout Scene click here.
NY ART BOOK FAIR at PS1 (LIC, Queens)
People who are designing and creating independent zines and books are a really important part of the Street Art and graffiti D.I.Y. culture and PS1 in Long Island City is a vast feast of cool printed matter this weekend. Starting today and running through Sunday, the Fair is presented by the esteemed establishment Printed Matter and if you don’t find stuff that engages you and blows your mind, it will be a surprise. One of the groups we highly recommend that you go and visit is the Pantheon Projects table (#12) where you’d find delicious hand crafted zines by Avoid, Droid, R2 and Carnage.
These little art books capture stuff on the street in a way that helps you organize and appreciate it – with wit and a street poet approach. They also can give advice occasionally, like the recipe we found for juicing cucumbers/pineapple and something else to produce “donut water”. Feast your eyes on the dope images and take in the authors’ notes and observations as they rack up serious road miles for the love of art and discovery. Here is a selection of images from spreads of these zines to give you an idea of what we’re talking about.
For further information, schedules and transportation regarding this Art Fair click here.
DUMBO ARTS FESTIVAL 2012 (Brooklyn)
This weekend Brooklyn is the the cultural STAR of New York City once again. The DUMBO Arts Festival opens today with more than 500 artists participating from all over the world. There will be open studios for you to visit, outdoor installations for you to explorer and huge video projections for you to be in awe of. Hop on the F train and get off at Jay Street and take in the breathtaking and majestic views of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges with the city’s skyline as a background.
The Future is in London tonight with FUTURISM 2.0 a group exhibition at the Blackall Studios presented by Gamma Proforma is now opens today to the general public with a reception starting at 6:00 pm.
For further information regarding this show click here.
JAZ “Metodologias del Discurso” (Argentina)
JAZ’s new solo show is now open at the Kosovo Gallery in Cordoba, Argentina. Known for his representational exploration of beasts and men this artists likess to work big with over scaled representations of his subjects. Internationally known, you’ll see his stuff at Street Art Festivals around the world, and in some back alleys and empty lots too.
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.
Futurism 2.0 is an exhibition, film and book examining parallels between 20th Century Futurism and 21st Century abstract urban art. In the film and book we talk to historians, critics, cultural figures and the artists at work. Discussing creative revolutions, our world and today’s 24/7 creative society. Uncovering this truly international movement, which connects via silicon and copper across the globe, where each development is transmitted digitally and consumed organically.
The exhibition takes place in London from 27th September – 3rd October. The launch party/private viewing is on the 27th September 6pm – Late – RSVP events@gammaproforma.com
Artists include: Augustine Kofie, Phil Ashcroft, Boris Tellegen (Delta), James Choules (sheOne), Matt W. Moore, Mark Lyken, Sat One, Christopher Derek Bruno, Moneyless, Mr Jago, Nawer, O. Two, Morten Andersen, Keith Hopewell(Part2ism), Jaybo Monk, Poesia, Derm, Jerry Inscoe (Joker), Remi/Rough, Clemens Behr and more…
Find out more about the project and the artists at www.futurism2-0.com, you can pre-order the book here.
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BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
