All posts tagged: harmen de hoop

BSA Film Friday: 02.16.18

February 16, 2018 Artists

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :
1. “The Clown” Harmen De Hoop
2. Artist’s Artist: The Process of Gary Lichtenstein
3. FinDAC: “The Wild Rose”
4. Ultra Wide by Good Guy Boris

BSA Special Feature: “The Clown” Harmen De Hoop

Harmen De Hoop is always playing with you. Ignoring the established almost calcified “rules” that have become encoded in the Street Art and graffiti game, his public interventions abide by a certain set of guidelines known mainly to him. By questioning nearly every assumption in the planning of public space he typically selects an unassuming, unflashy route of interaction to tweak your perceptions.

In this new direct street action he freshens the visage of a clown with some new hand paint. If he had an aerosol can or fat drippy marker in his hands this would produce a different reaction from an observer. Street Art, anyone?

Artist’s Artist: The Process of Gary Lichtenstein

“I’m an artists’ artist because I can think as an artist with the techniques I can use in printmaking,” says master printmaker Gary Lichtenstein as he narrates a brief visit to his Jersey City studio where he collaborates with photographer Janette Beckman and visual artist/graphic designer Cey Adams.

By showing us a process of evaluation and hearing the deliberations that go into final selection of materials and techniques, we are allowed to grasp the basics here and appreciate that there is artistry in bringing the image forward in a new way.

FinDAC: “The Wild Rose”

The English street muralist and portraitist FinDAC somewhat secretively painted a roof in Miami at the most recent Basel in December with the organizers of Wynwood Walls. Just now he has released “The Wild Rose” to fly free upon the wings of the Internet.

Ultra Wide by Good Guy Boris

Would this be good guy Boris or bad guy Boris? You decide.

NUART 2015 Roundup : A Laboratory on the Street

September 12, 2015 Artists

A roundup today for the Nuart street art/ mural festival in Norway with images of the final walls by this years artists. Now celebrating its 15th year, the mid-sized fjord-facing city of Stavanger has played host to a selection of international and local artists directly or indirectly related to the evolving scene we know as Street Art.

Ella & Pitr. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Again this year the selection of invited participants is varied, potent, and occasionally a smack upside the head – with punk rock graphic designer Jamie Reid leading the way in spirit and on walls. Reid’s inspiration dates to the radical hippie politics and Situationist practices of the 1950s and 60s but he is best known for formation of the Sex Pistols anti-monarchial slash and burn visual identity and for penning their pivotal recording “Anarchy in the UK” – a history discussed in Carlo McCormick’s presentation during the Nuart Plus program.

In tandem with his paste-ups around town and installation at the formal gallery show was the lesser-known street photography of very-well-known graffiti photographer and ethnographer Martha Cooper, who displayed a selection of five decades of children playing on the streets with improvised toys and games – via an automated slide show – as well as an additional one she narrated during our panel on this year’s theme “Play” at Nuart Plus.

Ella & Pitr. Detail. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

While neither Reid nor Cooper are thought of as Street Artists per se, their choice as participants gave grounding to the proceedings and is emblematic of director Martyn Reed’s holistic approach to an eclectic programming that mixes up the tributaries and the river in such a way that observers may better have tools to measure the creative flow that we are all witnessing on city walls across the globe today.

As we mark the halfway point of this decade and see the institutional discussions of Street Art taking form while academics try to place it in the canon of art-making and decide upon the nature of its impact, they do it with the knowledge that gallery shows, museum exhibitions, high-profile auctions, individual collecting, lifestyle marketers, and public festivals of many configurations and aspirations are already embracing its relevance. No one can possibly gauge this story in all of its complexity but some will capture its spirit. Being on the street helps.

Ella & Pitr. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

One way to get a pulse on the present is to attend shows like Nuart and witness the diverse stratagems that artists are using to engage their audiences and judge if they are successful at realizing their intentions. With a deliberately mixed bag of thinkers, feelers, documentors, aesthetes, and pranksters culled together for your edification, this show stokes the discussions.

Others may say that the headliners of this year’s Nuart were the French couple Ella & Pitr, whose record-setting 21,000 square meter mural of a young woman in running shorts lying in a semi-fetal position could only be viewed by helicopter across the roofs of a large construction company complex.

Ella & Pitr. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

You could say that Stavanger streets were commanded with greater effect by the simple addition of Spain’s Isaac Cordal and his handmade concrete (or resin) bald businessmen, fifty or so of which he glued into crevices and upon ledges and structural fissures on buildings throughout town. Their sad existential conundrums are ours, even though we are guilting them with all the corrupt actions we are at least a little complicit in.

Arguably the greatest metamorphosis took place with the collection and assembly of local detritus – broken car pieces, old bicycles, tires, even ship buoys. Before you roll your eyes and think of homey craft-inspired planters on front lawns, the likenesses of animals that Bordalo II can evoke with his sculptures is uncanny and a little spooky.

His “stag” deer is meant as a commentary on the loss of natural habitat of the animals at the hands of what we call “development”. The companion piece of a whale overwhelmed by environmental poisoning in the Tou Scene gallery installation proves equally compelling and tragic.

Ella & Pitr. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Harmen de Hoop invited a top economist to perform his installation purely with chalk and a 30-minute lecture on the streets of Stavanger on the subject of option pricing, Dolk bravely experimented with a new abstractionist, reductivist approach that ran counter to the style he is known for, and brothers Icy & Sot were the most currently topical with their portrait of a girl whose distorted visage is that of a refugee boat crammed with people. If Nuart at times feels like a laboratory it may be the perfect analogy for the street experience in cities everywhere.

Have a look at many of the finished walls at Nuart this year. See our essay marking their 15th anniversary HERE.

Ella & Pitr. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Isaac Cordal. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dotdotdot. Portrait of Sex Pistol’s Johnnie Rotten/John Lydon. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Martin Whatson. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Martin Whatson. Detail. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Martin Whatson. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Martin Whatson. Detail. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Pejac did a reinterpretation of “The Scream” by the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch, using a toy truck tire on a paint roller. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Futura. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. See his indoor installation video here. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Futura. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Sandra Chevrier. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Nafir. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The Outings Project. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ernest Zacharevic. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dolk. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Icy & Sot. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Icy & Sot. Detail. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Icy & Sot. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Bortusk Leer. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Bordalo II. The artist preps the wall in the background. Trash collected from near by empty lots sits in the foreground to serve as the raw material for his work. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The completed wall by Bordalo II. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Harmen de Hoop. CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE. Nuart 2015. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Harmen De Hoop “Permanent Education” from NUART

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This article is also published on The Huffington Post

BSA Images Of The Week: 09.06.15 NUART 2015 SPECIAL

September 6, 2015 Artists

After Stavanger Mayor Christine Sagen Helgø made the official declaration of the opening of the Nuart gallery show at Tou Scene last night the sliding barn door on the ex beer factory moved back to allow the crowd to flow in like a river to see this years collection of art installations in the “tunnels” of the space. This component of the Nuart experience allows a certain degree of curation and idea development that brings you a fuller appreciation of the artists who create murals on the street as well.

Additionally, and we are telling you nothing secret here, the adhoc crew of technicians and scene creators here are rough and ready; obviously over qualified and with a fair degree of refinement when it comes to helping the artist realize some of their grander aspirations. Artists are encouraged to think big and a number of them have this year, including some who are so capacious they nearly collide or eclipse one another, but visitors this year may feel like the quality and depth of this editions 5-week show just advanced by a length.

This week’s interview with the street is not actually on the street – but rather a reflection of the direction that the street can take a curated collection of current artists and corollary influencers from years past.

Clearly you can go as deeply or shallowly as you want with this years theme of “Play”. Harmen de Hoop’s video of Thursday’s performance piece on Stavanger’s streets by a renowned mathematics and statistics professor Jan Ubøe, who mystifies the assembled audience while explaining the factors that form our world economy is rather utterly balanced on a jerking seesaw with Bortusk Leer’s incessantly cheery monster diorama.

50 years of selected photographs by ethnographer Martha Cooper of children in cities around the world at play with improvised tools and methods are almost matched in impact by Ernest Zacharevic’s slowly tumultous sea waters tossing a child’s paper boat with a handful of kids inside, evoking the current news with immigrants escaping to Europe in dangerous waters. Isaac Cordal’s installation of achingly desperate white-collar men in a desperate diorama is uplifted by Ella & Pitr’s fairy tale giant reaching from the heavens to pick one from a chair.

Sandra Chevrier brings a signature masking of a woman’s visual and olefactory senses, quite alone in the bright spotlight. The iconic ripped shreds and piled irony of Jamie Reid brings the radicalized hippie and punk politics into front and center while Pixel Pancho and Bordalo II each take swipes at the oil economy that dominates our lives while killing others.

Bordalo alone could command the entire space with his found/reclaimed Stavanger refuse that is fashioned into a immensely tragic scene of a spent whale submerged in muck and spouting that black gooey pulp from it’s blow-hole. Icy & Sot next door use their understated humor and biting criticism with a summer tree in a verdant hue captured as soliloquey, first appearing leafy and fluttering from a fan-stirred breeze, then revealed as suffocated by 300 petroleum-based green plastic shopping bags that are caught in its branches.

Finally the painterly abstractions of Futura across half a tunnel are set free, poignantly balancing the symbolic liberty of Martin Whatson’s graffitied butterfly, now cravenly pierced and readied for your private collection.

While you can practically smell the brands hovering over quality events like these to hopefully insinuate themselves into – Nuart continues to keep its independence of curation, broadening its branches with the Tou Scene installations and deepening its roots with academic forums and related programming in such a way that its true nature remains. Hopefully it will be to continue this way despite a tightening Norwegian economy.

Yes there was some talk at panels this week about the fact that a 15 year old Street Art mural festival is in itself an institution and anathema to what the graffiti/street/urban art practice may have originated from, but one of the myriad outcomes of pounding away with purpose at thoughtful parallel programming like this Tou Scene show year after year is that you may also develop something uniquely relevant in its own right.

Here’s our weekly interview with the street – this week via the exhibition space of Nuart 2015 and featuring Bordalo II, Bortusk Leer, Dolk, Dot Dot Dot, Ella & Pitr, Ernest Zacharevic, Furtura, Harmen de Hoop, Icy & Sot, Isaac Cordal, Jamie Reed, Martha Cooper, Outings Project, Pixel Pancho, and Sandra Chevrier.

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