Illustrator, painter, and lover of Japanese monster movies Dan Kitchener (aka Dank) brought Tokyo’s glistening night streets to Barcelona last week. His signature reflective romance with evening magic and the electrified dense cityscape during a downpour has led him to paint walls in cities worldwide.
Here we have the side walls of the Arnau Theater – which photographer Luis Olive Bulbena tells us “was inaugurated in 1903 as a music hall, and was in operation until 2004. Currently, under rehabilitation, it is now owned by the Barcelona City Council.
A rolling street exhibition space, these three walls that protect the theater are coordinated by the Arnau Gallery and Street Art Barcelona, who work with a new artist here nearly every month. Special thanks to Lluis Olive Bulbena for sharing these images with BSA readers.
Dan Kitchener refers to this stage of the project as working with ghosts. “Managed to get the ghost lines super detailed – loving the feel of this already – great to be painting in Barcelona. Such a beautiful city!” he says mid-project.
In a demonstration of people power and the role of street artists as activists, we look today at a neighborhood called Poblenou in Barcelona, whose residents have been gripped in a struggle with real estate developers. The developers have tried to destroy the buildings, the history, and the culture of the area, the local citizen’s group says, and they intend to dissuade them. According to Poblenou neighbors, the large real estate company has attempted to persuade the local city board to purchase a cluster of buildings, including houses with great historical and emotional value, to replace them with offices and high-end residential buildings.
After about five years, the battle rages, with locals saying that the Poblenou neighborhood stands as a symbol of struggle and resistance for the working-class people who built it and that people are proud of what the area has accomplished over time. It is a familiar refrain, this gentrification brought by investors – often these days aided and abetted by the “beautification” of the neighborhood by artists.
In this case, the artists are lending their skills to help the fight for the neighborhood instead. The number includes artist Tim Marsh who lives here. Today we see the wall he and like-minded creatives created, focusing in many cases on people who live here, in “the Passage” of Poblenou.
We thank photographer Lluis Olive Bulbena for sharing his photos of some of the artists and their murals with BSA Readers.
Post-Graffiti? Surreal-Primitive? Flat-Channel Brute? This stuff is hard to categorize sometimes as the roots are in graffiti and advertising and illustration and communications and all art history- but for sure a lot of this fresh paint looks fresh indeed in Barcelona.
BSA contributor and photographer Lluis Olive-Bulbena hit a graffiti jam with some notable names on the streets, including two of Barcelona’s most notorious; Aryz and Sixe Paredes. ¡Qué guay!
The 6th edition of the Full Colors graffiti and street art festival in Rubi took off at the end of October with 30 artists from all over Spain. 30 minutes from Barcelona, its billed as a community event in the Plaça Josep Tarradellas, neighbors from the area come and watch the artists as they are painting and get a taste for the skill and ingenuity needed to create works on walls.
The three-day event is sponsored by the civic/political Catalunya organization called Rubí Jove, which has a youth center nearby and offers a program of connecting artists with free walls in the city to paint throughout the year. In addition to the graffiti/street art jam, the weekend’s events included DJs and a lot of skateboarders getting gnarly and landing tricks all over the place.
Included in the list of this year’s edition are: Stain, Absurda Sociedad, Caneda, Idok, Ares, Teck, Mugraf, Rubicon, Chea, Atena, Kanet, Maria Die, Zoen, Obhen, Urihktr , Aker, Urih, Cayn Sanchez, Baie, Axia, Kets, Ceser, Saker, Rosa, Megui, Valiente, Jose Luis, Esme, Ruth and Maga. Photographer Lluis Olivas Bulbena stopped by Rubi and shows BSA readers some shots that he caught.
Down by the riverside. This is where the walls are nearly reserved for these artists about 30 kilometers north of Barcelona on the Congost River (Riu Congost).
Photographer Lluis Olive-Bulbena likes to get out on his graff-street art exploratory safaris early in the morning. This river bank is one of his regular spots to check. Lo and behold! He says these pieces are fresh – painted in the last ten days by this group of seven artists.
Three Chimneys (3 Xemeneies) Park in Barcelona sponsored a fall Mural Jam again this year and photographer Lluis Olive Bulbena shares some of the results with BSA readers. BCN once again organized the event along with the 6th Periferia Beat Festival where more than 50 artists came to show their skills and spend a relaxing day with their family and peers. Also onboard were DJs, concerts, dance performances, a roller skate jam, and an art market. This community event continues to grow and some say that this was the biggest roster by far.
Festival d’Art Urbà Poliniza Dos may have an online presence that is difficult to access for the average street art fan. Still, the murals created for this ongoing urban art festival at the Polytechnic University of Valencia speak for themselves.
Brilliant productions and unusual investigations are created in and around the campus, engaging students and the local community to consider the role of art in the public sphere, its pertinence and meaning, and our relationship to it. Its direct and scholarly approach means that the public is invited, and artists are given an opportunity to share their practice with an appreciative and considered audience.
For more than a decade, this competition has selected from an open call for submissions and invited many of Spain’s curious thinkers, experimenters, interventionists, trouble-makers, street artists, and muralists to create new pieces for consideration, discussion, and appreciation. This program is where the work is done on the wall, inside the mind, and in the heart.
Recently photographer Luis Olive captured these murals from the 2021 and 2022 editions of PolinizaDos, and he shares what he found today with BSA readers.
Street art continues to move to small towns and cities, expressing itself in various manners. The 7th edition of the Cheste Street Art Festival (Graffitea Cheste) is a perfect example of how dispersed the scene has become as it intertwines with murals. The result is a more sophisticated survey of art movements than most towns would ever see, including those with museums.
The town of Cheste (Xest in Valencian) is in the province of Valencia, and its nearly 9,000 inhabitants are traditionally involved with agriculture, with an emphasis on wine. Sponsored by the city, a few brands, foundations, and art institutions, you won’t find many politically challenging themes, but the scale and quality of work can be appreciable.
One small series of five paintings of particular note are the blurred video versions (if you will) of interpretations of works painted at the turn of the previous century by the Spanish Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla. With roots in graffiti and street art, the artist Salvaje Selva is a painting teacher in Madrid. Frequently he also paints with Kako Selva on collaborative murals under the moniker Gesto. Selva says these new murals are “in homage to the great master” on his Instagram page.
“It has been a real pleasure to be able to work based on the work of this great painter, who has inspired me to interpret freely and let myself go,” he says. “In addition, studying from painting and practice is always very grateful. It gives you a deeper insight into the work of artists. Within this dialogue, I wanted to include the relationship with the support and leave part of the voice of the wall itself.”
The degree of community involvement for Graffitea Cheste is substantial and sincere with tours, symposia, and educational programming. By the end of the June festival this year, there were 13 more murals added to the extensive collection. The celebration closed with a flourish and a screening of the documentary about the great Valencian illustrator José Segrelles.
We thank photographer Lluis Olive Bulbena for sharing his discoveries with BSA readers.
The storied, busy, festive Spanish city of Valencia lies about an hour south of Fanzara, and the difference between the two could not be more pronounced. One of many across the country, this small town has been aging, shrinking in population, a shadow of its former charming self. Since the Fanzara Miau Mural Festival began about a decade ago, that direction has been slowly reversing, with an infusion of murals all over town.
The tourist trafficked has become notable, and that youthful demographic once again wanders through the winding streets, greeting old timers and taking photos of the murals and of course, posing for selfies in front of them.
The artworks are quite varied, with street artists now often formally trained studio professionals and those working in the advertising and commercial art industries. Thankfully the feeling remains free spirited, and many artists appear to await inspiration for their subject matter until arriving, preferring to be inspired by their new environment and creating something that initiates dialogue with their surroundings.
From the classically figurative to naïve, illustrative to photorealistic, the natural world to daily life, the common thread is thoughtful and considered work that is far from the hype of other street art festivals – and safely far from commercial gloss.
Today we have new photos from the 2022 edition by frequent contributor Lluis Olive Bulbena.
Urban environments continue to evolve and adapt to the exigencies of population growth caused in part by the exodus of people from rural areas to metropolia around the world. Structural features of infrastructure previously thought of as “modern” is now simply eyesores as people aim to incorporate imagery and symbols of natural beauty and human warmth. “Calming” solutions in otherwise noisy and congested streets and boulevards in megacities include the reclaiming of space and “greening” of areas that were once reserved for motorists.
City leaders and urban planners more often now work with arts organizations to create a new visual landscape for our cities – by creating art programs to beautify spaces. One such project is in the municipality of Sant Adrià de Besos in the Spanish city of Barcelona.
According to the description, translated from Catalan to English on the organizer’s IG account, (@elbosc_encantat_c31), the project is “An open-air mural art museum. An impressive creative forest is formed by more than 200 columns that support the C-31 on its way through the municipality of Sant Adrià de Besos. A unique project in the world with the participation of local and international artists”. The project, while impressive, is not unique, as artists and organizations have been using highway support pillars to paint murals in cities all over the world as reported HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.
The project EL BOSC ENCANTAT DE SANT ADRIÀ, is curated by Zosen and Juanki, and it began in 2016. It is carried out in collaboration with the Sant Adriá City Council and the Asociación Cultural El Generador, with the support of TRAMmi, it is part of the HOP Sant Adrià-Art Urbá.”
As the weather turns warmer, activities on the streets become more fevered, energetic, free.
Graffiti writers burst out of the doors to their apartments and houses with backpacks filled with markers and cans, looking for opportunities to express themselves, to claim space, to be seen. Last week in Spain, a crew of the most actively known writers in Catalonia got together for a graffiti jam on the embankments of the Rio Congost a few miles from Barcelona. BSA contributor and photographer Lluis Olive took a day trip to the area to document and share the results of the jam with our readers.
These wheat pastes have been appearing on the streets of Barcelona after about two years of hiatus. The author (is it a collective or a single individual?) calls themselves Casa De Balneario and they are back with spiced bon mots for the passersby: clever drawings executed in a DIY style that make them approachable, quizzical, and a favorite in the streets of Barcelona.
Dryly hand-written and accompanied by stiffly simple renderings recalling mid century ads or propaganda posters, these are gentle critiques of our self-deceptions, our pop-consumer culture bromides, our willingness to overlook the unpleasant truth of our slowly warming pot of water. They look at assumptions regarding surveillance, work conditions, civil liberty, and our economic shift downward and pose a question indirectly: How did we settle for this?
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
