A contemporary apparition of the goddess. Or goddesses.
Two of them are merged here in the geometric mosaic of a face in Madrid, thanks to the genuinely original portraitist named Uriginal.
Give up on who they are? This new woman is Athena, the Greek goddess of war and civilization, merged with Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and the arts. Of course. Now you see it. And the faithful lush and furry wolf/German Shepard at her hand, who points his ears forward and ready to rip out the neck of his prey? He is similarly treated with Uriginals’ deconstruction of the portrait – organic forms sheared by geometric ones, blinking and winking at you, clapping and spinning, commanding the powers of nature, their fractal-formed facades as mysterious as it is forward.
With its free sampling across cultures and significance, a nervous twitching of screen-jumping eye candy and associations, it’s a brilliant reclaiming of the classics on this 138-square meter wall for a real estate company client. This is not fashion; its art – this is full-on gamer goddess of power – fed through a few filters. The kids are going to love this one.
Graffti and street artists are often targeted by owners of real estate for their illegal artworks – it’s a tradition. These days those same artists are approached by real estate companies to give their property some urban “edge”, increasing their appeal to younger populations.
In the case of one large corporation in Spain that rents student housing, the appeal has been paying off by giving their properties a ‘hip’ sort of brand, thanks to huge murals by street artists and others. The art is not deliberately political or controversial and usually is aesthetically pleasing to a wide audience.
Recently the Madrid-based collective Boa Mistura artists have left their unique artistic imprint on a 107 square meter surface of interior and exterior walls – using layered colorful typography to allude to the compendium of memories and experiences that can build during your life in one place.
“The murals represent the essence of everything that happens inside a residence: a meeting point, a place of dialogue and refuge,” say the artists say. They say that, with time, your home becomes “a place that is deeply rooted, building stories and memories for life”. In this case, the student living site is at Carlos III University Campus in Getafe.
Bringing their unique blend of old-world European white classical sculpture and the bright side of modern urban vandalism to Barcelona, the artistic duo PichiAvo paints the Greek goddess Athena engulfed in bubble tags. Freshly finished this week across 125 square meters, the mural depicts a particular version of the Pallas Athena’s sculpture in the Austrian Parliament that is in Vienna.
The Great Mother Goddess of wisdom, useful arts, and prudent warfare here emerges from a layered cloud of tags drawn from the artists’ friends and peers, local tributes, and a wide range of styles from modern graffiti practice. Here in Esplugues de Llobregat the multi-story mural graces a student residence designed by the Portuguese architect José Quintela da Fonseca.
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