From the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, at the Urban Morphogenesis festival, we see constructivism of an ecological nature by Vitaly Tsarenkov aka SY.
Vitaly Tsarenkov aka SY: “Love Of Nature”. Urban Morphogenesis Festival. Chelyabinsk, Russia. (photo courtesy of the artist)
“The name of the mural is ‘Love For Nature,’ ” SY tells us. “It’s about man’s exploitative treatment of the environment.”
Vitaly Tsarenkov aka SY: “Love Of Nature”. Urban Morphogenesis Festival. Chelyabinsk, Russia. (photo courtesy of the artist)
A creator of paintings, murals, and sculptures, SY began his artistic career with graffiti and later moved to studio work and exhibitions. A child of the 1990s, he says his visual language is influenced by the aesthetics of 8-bit console video games, and you can see the simply vivid 3-D geometry continues to excites his imagination. He also says he was influenced by the Russian revolutionary avant-garde, and engineering drawing.
Vitaly Tsarenkov aka SY: “Love Of Nature”. Urban Morphogenesis Festival. Chelyabinsk, Russia. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Perhaps anti-intuitive to the idea
of those early computer games, his focus is often to examine social, political,
mental and the metaphysical. “The whole world stands on the threshold of global
ecological catastrophes,” he says as he takes a break from the new 18 story
mural that took him and two assistants 16 days to complete. “A lot of people
haven’t realized yet that the future of our planet depends on the actions of
every single person.”
Vitaly Tsarenkov aka SY: “Love Of Nature”. Urban Morphogenesis Festival. Chelyabinsk, Russia. (photo courtesy of the artist)Vitaly Tsarenkov aka SY: “Love Of Nature”. Urban Morphogenesis Festival. Chelyabinsk, Russia. (photo courtesy of the artist)Vitaly Tsarenkov aka SY: “Love Of Nature”. Urban Morphogenesis Festival. Chelyabinsk, Russia. (photo courtesy of the artist)Vitaly Tsarenkov aka SY: “Love Of Nature”. Urban Morphogenesis Festival. Chelyabinsk, Russia. (photo courtesy of the artist)Vitaly Tsarenkov aka SY: “Love Of Nature”. Urban Morphogenesis Festival. Chelyabinsk, Russia. (photo courtesy of the artist)
OKUDA is melting! Even in sub-zero frigid weather like this!
OKUDA. With Artmossphere in collaboration with the National Art Museum of the Republic of Sakha. Yakutsk, Russia. (photo courtesy of Artmossphere)
As the US Midwest suffers a once in a generation “polar vortex” over the last few days, it may be hard to believe but that level of freezing cold is typical January weather in Yakutsk, Russia, where the average day in this city of 300,000 is −38 degrees celsius (−37 farenheit).
Yakutsk temperature reading during the Okuda sculpture installation (photo copyright Мария Васильева)
Spanish
Street Artist and fine artist Okuda, who deals in powerful displays of
tropicalia geometric color in his murals and sculptures, ventures far afield
here- or should we say far atundra.
Sasha Krolikova, who curated this project with Artmossphere and the Yakut Biennale of Contemporary Art, says this is the world’s northernmost sculpture created by Okuda. The area is being developed into a modern urban space for recreation and sports and cycling area (it will be warmer this summer, promise). She says the installation is with the support of the National Art Museum of the Republic of Sakha and appears on the embankment of Sajsary Lake in Yakutsk.
OKUDA. With Artmossphere in collaboration with the National Art Museum of the Republic of Sakha. Yakutsk, Russia. (photo courtesy of Artmossphere)
“We had a lot of work to do with the colors,” says Krolikova, “because they don’t look the same as in Spain when they have been exposed to this cold.” A melting skull with a spiked mohawk in technicolor, the capital city of Sakha Republic is going to have this Okuda for a long time – since it is made of steel. Not many people are likely to see it until spring here however, we are guessing.
OKUDA. With Artmossphere in collaboration with the National Art Museum of the Republic of Sakha. Yakutsk, Russia. (photo courtesy of Artmossphere)
2018 has been a good year for Street Art books, and your interest in the ones we have highlighted continues to assure us that “Print” is not dead. There is no better way to document a moment in this evolving scene for posterity than with the bound volume, and sometimes there is no better way to appreciate an artists work than to sit by a lamp or window with a book on your lap.
We know that you appreciate our daily analysis and efforts to elucidate and illustrate a fluid global Street Art/ graffiti / urban art scene here in digital, but we’re thrilled to give you solid options in book form as well. If you’re looking for a good quality art book to give this year, consider one of these hits from 2018. Enjoy!
“Certainties, simple explanations, last hopes, magic thoughts and fears. All of them confronted by what is evident.”
Thus describes the figure slung with bullets, holding a necklace with a cross and delicately balancing a small green apple on his index finger on a larger than life mural in Santiago, Chili. The visual language of this graffiti/Street Artist and muralist named Inti is his to wield, a cosmic folk expression that glows with celestial waves surrounding an other-worldly race of characters.
INTI. Éditions Albin Michel, 2017. Paris, France. Click HERE for more about this book.
Such is the splendid stuff of dreams and discovery for Bordalo II, the Lisbon-based Street Artist and maker of garbage relief animal portraits in cities across the world.
These are the things that when arranged on shelves and placed in relation to a floor plan, within parameters and boundaries of our mundanity, will comprise a perfect environment of domesticity; full of memory, associative emotion, symmetry. Objects, materials melted and poured, carved and plain, screwed and snapped, polished and sprayed, emulsified, inset, extruded, coiled, soldiered, plated, woven. These dimensional collections of matter matter to us. Metal alloy. Plastic polymer. Blown glass. Rubber, copper, steel, bakelite, particle board, glue.
Disarrange. You create chaos, disruption, disunity, discontent. Arrange again and create a muskrat, a buck deer, a petulant parakeet, an undulant octopus.
Bordalo II 2011 – 2017. Editor & Publisher Bordalo II. In conjunction with ATTERO and exhibition by Bordalo II held in Lisbon. November, 2017. Lisbon, Portugal. Click HERE for more about this book.
“The constant imposition of advertising in front of our eyes is an oppressive, dictatorial and violent act,” posits the artist, activist, and author Hogre in this new collection of works and words called Subvertising : The Piracy of Outdoor Advertising.
It sounds rather extreme when put this way, but perhaps that is the dulling power of advertising’s omnipresence in public space year after year. Each of us can certainly recall a time when there seemed like there was more open public space and fewer images and graphics and text telling us what to do, what to buy, who to hate, how to behave. Artists like Hogre are sounding the warning on our ability to recognize its power over our perceptions.
HOGRE. Subvertising: The Piracy Of Outdoor Advertising. Dog Section Press. London, 2017. Click HERE for more about this book.
Via his own pop-culture interpretation of the interlocking curvilinear, geometric and graphic motifs, the Portuguese artist is firing new pieces daily in the kiln of his studio in Cascais. For a decade or so his interpretations of the tin-glazed ceramic tilework have been appearing on inordinate secondary city skins in the paths of pedestrians: visual illusions meant to appear as layers of urban bark peeling back from surfaces you take for granted to reveal heritage, history, artisanship.
While the interiors and exteriors of churches, palaces, schools and subway stations are covered with azulejos in Lisbon, thanks to Add Fuel (Diogo Machado) they have travelled to other cities and cultures as well. Each time he is attracted to the tile-making traditions locally, and he often incorporates his study of these new histories as well.
Add / Fuel – 1 – Monograph. Published by Diogo Machado. Portugal 2018. Click HERE for more about this book.
A serendipitous meeting somewhere in Berlin set this project in motion, and the results unveil an adrenaline fueled ride that always pushes, often exceeds the boundaries of physical safety and social acceptance while simultaneously thrilling graffiti fans and pissing off some public officials and property owners.
A new book captures the nature of the actions and adds to our conversations about art, vandalism, branding, public/personal space and its radical visual disruption. It’s a story made all the more remarkable during an increasing level of surveillance in a city that has basically embraced the bohemian and rebellious types who have transformed large parts of its cityscape, making Berlin a de facto capital of subculture, especially among the young.
Martha Cooper & Ninja K. One Week With 1UP. (photo courtesy of the team) Click HERE for more about this book.
A steel-wheeled graffiti train with Roger Gastman at the controls roars into LA’s Chinatown for a two-month stay at this station, a 40,000 square foot warehouse that houses “Beyond the Streets.” Originating at the streets and train yards of the 1960s and 70s, this express survey carries with it 100 or so artists and writers from across the last five decades as practitioners of graffiti, Street Art, and mural painting. Somehow, everyone gets represented.
It sounds the same on the street as it does in the gallery space, and for Norwegian Street Artist Anders Gjennestad the two appear nearly identical, aside from context.
Whether he is discovering the neglected urban factory door long after the spirit of industry has roared its last turbine and reaching toward his backpack for a spray can, or he is hoisting a piece out from the pile of collected iron-bound wooded slabs in his Berlin studio, functionally each of these doors is a canvas.
Every urban explorer sees the potential of walls that are long abandoned and spoiled with rot and piss and pushed open by weeds, worn away by rain. The world is a temporary place anyway. I am only here temporarily.
Anders Gjennestad. “Canvas”. Published by Galerie Friedmann – Hahn. Berlin 2018. Click HERE for more about this book.
As you look through this new slim volume about the Street Artist/fine artist FKDL it may strike you how much autobiography is the determinant of an artist’s path as well. It’s the tale of a teenager finding himself, finding his vocation, and eventually finding his voice on the street. When you reach the end you see that it takes a number of years and a lot of experimentation, this journey.
FKDL. Galiote Prenant. Choisy-le-Roi, France. 2017. Click HERE for more about this book.
“These are artists who are thus not slavishly reproducing their exterior practice within an interior realm but who are, rather, taking the essence of graffiti – its visual principles, its spatial structures, its technical methods, its entrenched ethics – and reinterpreting them with the studio domain,” says author Rafael Schacter in his introductory exposition for his book Street to Studio where he offers a unique assessment derived from his 10 years of researching the foundational, conceptual, methodological, and ethical considerations that impact the original graffiti/Street Art scene as well as where it is going.
Rafael Schacter. Street To Studio. Lund Humphries Publishers. London, 2018. Click HERE for more about this book.
Street Artist/fine artist Adele Renault understands our interdependence with the birds and with each other perhaps better than many, and “Feathers and Faces” carries the message powerfully by delivering these works she has done on city streets and galleries in New York, Berlin, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Singapore, Burkina Faso, Helsinki, Moscow…
We share this city with pigeons. We look to the same environment to supply us with what we need, including food, water, shelter – depending on physical factors like as soil, air, a temperate climate, other organisms. Adele studies our feathered friends and brings them full force to the streets, and we know that here only the scrappiest survive and get to display their colors.
Feathers And Faces by Adele Renault was published in 2018 and is distributed in the United States and Canada by SCB Distributors. Click HERE for more about this book.
Prayers of supplication and longing, racing teams of stallions and master felines of fury, the exhausted figure of a dream barely still illuminated, a wistful stage in the plundered urban landscape, or a plundered life.
This is what she does to you. As Faith IXVII leaves her stolen stanza, her massive mural in washed hues, her tributes to a moment lost in a city that would leave you to die if it had its way, she makes you make poetry.
Faith XLVII. “EX ANIMO’ THE WORK OF FAITH FORTY SEVEN/ 2010-2018. Drago Publishing. Rome, Italy, 2018. Click HERE for more about this book.
And el Seed is the first to tell you that in this deeply personal account of his art project across fifty buildings in Mashiyat Naser, a neighborhood of Cairo over two years ago. Born of his personal need to challenge himself and to add more to his career as a respected muralist, his original concept of working in this neighborhood of 70,000 recyclers was informed by his own assumptions, perhaps of helping a community known in the city as Zabbaleen, or “garbage people”.
Over the course of the project he and his team describe through interviews and with his own diary style how their own eyes were opened. It is an incremental revelatory experience that paralleled the quote that he stylized throughout the pattern of his piece, “Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eyes first,” from the writings of Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, a fourth century Coptic Bishop.
El Seed PERCEPTION Published by Point à la Ligne. Milan, Italy. 2018. Click HERE for more about this book.
One thing that some Street Artists do when their work enters the white cube is drop the “street” from their official moniker, instead preferring to be known simply as an “artist”. The decision is possibly to rid themselves of any subtle class distinctions or otherwise negative connotations that a potential collector or curator may have with the “street artist” label.
Other artists formerly known as “Street Artists” feel limited by the title because it doesn’t include all of their new interests and their complete practice – or because the term itself has evolved in their mind and the mind of the public to mean something unfavorable that they do not like to be associated with.
When it comes to the internationally renowned Street Artist Invader, its not a consideration – the street is in his DNA. His cryptic tile-made street practice is so proliferate across the world and so much a part of the metropolis like in his hometown of Paris that his art is literally and psychically fused with the city.
Invasion Los Angeles 2.1 / Updated Edition 1999 – 2018. A Book By Invader. Published by Control P. Editions. France 2018. Click HERE for more about this book.
“Russian Urban Art: History and Conflicts”, Igor Ponosov.
An academically sourced opinion-based essay in book form that looks to art, social, economic, and geopolitical movements during the start of the 20th century to better understand the evolution of Urban Art in post-Soviet Russia, Igor Ponosov delivers a welcome reconstruction of the timeline and movements that bring urban art to this day.
With the renewed interest in public art and muralism that has erupted over the last decade in many so-called Western cities it is good to learn how the public space in Russia has been catalyzed not-only by Hip Hop and new graffiti forms from Europe but also the history of Avant-garde art movements and Soviet Muralism in Russian Urban Art: History and Conflicts.
Igor Ponosov. Russian Urban Art: History And Conflicts. Moscow 2018. Published in collaboration with Street Art Museum, St Petersburg, Russia. Click HERE for more about this book.
BSA is in Moscow as curators of 50+ international artists in the Artmossphere Biennale 2018 for its 3rd edition called Street Art Wave. Till the end of the month we’ll working with a stellar cross section of people involved with Urban Art/Street Art/Graffiti at curious and fascinating intersections. We’re meeting with Street Artists, academics, collectors, gallerists, museum curators, organizers, and thoughtful pontificators of all sorts in studio, on the street, behind the scenes, and on display. Come with us!
As curators we were asked to write a text about Martha Cooper and Adele Renault and their collaborative project for the Artmossphere Biennale 2018 in Moscow. We think it is equally appropriate for the work in process photos here and the interviews BSA had with both:
“A perfectly paired duo of artist and photographer who each engage with Street Art from two distinctly different perspectives, this collaborative project puts the focus on a shared interest.
Adele Renault grew up in the Belgian Ardennes and at a very early age began traveling the world; sometimes solo, quickly developing an adept eye at studying places and people. A classically trained painter with a realistic style, she focuses her camera and her brushes on smaller details that may sometimes be overlooked but which add texture and rich interest to the mundane or unrecognized. With her beautifully realized portraits she is able to capture the depths of her subjects by the expression in their eyes, the details of lines on their face, and the candid innocent smile that flashes quickly.
However her love is with pigeons. Her pigeon paintings and murals give the oft-derided birds their rightful place in our cities where they are often considered pests that are equal to rats.
Teaming up with famed photographer Martha Cooper is a pure coup d’état. Ms. Cooper’s fame within the graffiti and Street Art community is legendary but her photographic interests are many. A documentarian and ethnographer, she grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, a US city that is famous for its once-thriving community of pigeon fanciers – and their elaborate coops. For Ms. Cooper the intersection of pigeons and their fanciers presents a fascinating and educational opportunity to capture with her lens the relationship between humans and their aviary friends in their habitats…the coops.
Ms. Cooper has been photographing pigeon coops in Baltimore and in New York where she currently lives – and in many other cities that she visits every year. For Artmossphere both Ms. Renault and Ms. Cooper have found a shared passion that drives them both even harder to create. Designing a site-specific environment and using locally found materials; both artists have trained their attention to the Russian tradition of painting pigeon coops. They hope that their installation respectfully represents the local culture and history while combining Adele’s paintings of pigeons and Martha’s photographs of the pigeon’s coops.”
Pigeons were the original Internet, email, messenger. As carriers they were the quickest and most efficient way for people across cultures to communicate. Cooper and Renault have created the ultimate exhibit that ties together the themes of OFFLINE in a very local and global way. With Martha’s photographs of pigeons from over forty years and Adele’s uncanny ability to faithfully create the plumage and character of the bird over the last decade on city walls everywhere, the original message carriers are more than getting their due in Moscow.
BSA:Yesterday at the round table discussion someone made the connection between this show being “Offline” and pigeons carrying messages. Can you talk about that a bit? Martha: That was a brilliant connection because neither of us had thought about it. Yes there were lots of pigeons that used to carry messages, specially during wartime. The messages were secret and written in code stuffed in little capsules and attached to the pigeon’s legs. The pigeons were able to fly across enemy lines. So here we have the Internet and the name of this exhibition is “Offline” so what can be more offline than a pigeon carrying a message.
BSA:About this project in Moscow. What was the most surprising element? Adele: When I travel I try not to have expectations but for this project the most surprising thing was the location. The space is so beautiful and it’s inspiring being here. And the people of course. Sabina, I knew she was going to be nice because Martha has been telling me great things about her but she and her team are wonderful. It is very nice to work with nice people. The most important thing is the people.
BSA:Where were the photos being shown here taken? Martha: Africa, Asia, North America and Europe.
BSA: Adele, what’s your fascination with pigeons? Was it from childhood? Adele: No, I grew up on a farm but we had more chickens than pigeons. The first time I saw a lot of pigeons was in Venice in the Piazza San Marco. My parents had a hard time pulling me away from them. I just wanted to stay with the pigeons. The fascination is mostly that they are everywhere, in every city and they look the same everywhere and I never run out of subjects. They are like a metaphor for people. In 2007 or 2008 I painted the first oil close-up painting of a pigeon and my first mural of a pigeon was in 2010.
BSA:You found an Icon at the flea market in Moscow. Martha: We did! And it has a pigeon painted on it.
BSA:So was the found icon the inspiration to make the display wall in the shape of an icon? Adele: No it was the other way around. I knew that in Russia there are a lot of religious triptychs with Madonna and other religious imagery in gold leaf and inside the churches. When we came in and saw the exhibition space with all of these arches we thought that we wanted to have an arch and actually paint the arch directly on the wall but because the building is a landmark we were not permitted to paint directly on it.
So we asked if the temporary wall could be a triptych instead of a simple long panel. So then at the flea market we found the triptych with the Madonna and two pigeons painted on it. So everything about this installation makes so much sense and the process has been entirely organic. We also wanted to have real pigeons inside the coop but we found that that wasn’t permitted. So we then thought about having a porcelain pigeon or something like that inside the coop. Today a Russian girl who I gave a book to a couple of days ago came back to visit and told me that she had a present for me; a souvenir from Russia and she proceeds to pull out this porcelain pigeon!
BSA:What was the genesis of this collaboration with Martha? Adele: Every time we see each other we talk about our attraction to pigeons and she tells me that she has been taking photos of pigeons for a long time. We were together in Los Angeles for “Beyond The Streets” and she mentioned to me the Moscow Biennale and how in Moscow artists paint the pigeon’s coops on the outside. So she encouraged me to send an application for us to participate in this year’s biennale in collaboration and I did.
BSA:Can you tell us about the small pigeon on the front of the pigeon coop? Adele: The small one on the front is the last passenger pigeon who died in 1914. The original passenger pigeons are extinct. And this pigeon’s name was ironically Martha – and it resides in taxidermy in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. So we named this coop “Coop’s Coop” because Martha’s friends call her Coop. So it really is Martha Cooper’s coop. But passenger pigeons were used in the two big wars to bring messages in code and they were rewarded with medals for their service.
BSA:So what about the old, paint peeling off frames you are using to display the photos? Martha: When we first thought about putting photos up we wanted rough looking frames and I had this idea, based on my previous visits to Moscow and the flea market that we would be able to find them at the flea market and we found tons of frames actually. We got them cheaply and it was a lot of fun going around collecting them.
BSA: Martha our eyes gravitated to the B & W photo of the boy holding two pigeons. What’s his name and who is he? Martha: His name is Edwin but his writer’s name is HE3 and he introduced me to Dondi. I was working on a project on the Lower East Side and I was interested in his pigeons and he asked me why didn’t I take pictures of graffiti and proceeded to show me his notebook with his drawings in it.
He said “I can introduce you to a King”. And the King was Dondi. So I said “OK let’s go”. We drove to East New York in my car and directed me to Dondi’s house.
We knock on his door and Dondi was there. He recognized my name because when he opened his black book on the first page he had a clipping from The New York Post with a photo of a very simple throw up and I was amazed that anybody would identify it and it said CIA, Crazy Inside Artists. That was his crew and I didn’t know anything about crews. When he saw me he knew I wasn’t a cop but instead he saw me as someone that could help him get fame. Boom!
BSA:So the B & W photo above is 40 years old? Martha: Yes
BSA:Can you talk about the large painting of the pigeon in the center of the triptych? Martha: This is a painting of a pigeon that we actually met in Moscow in a pigeon coop. One of the pigeon fanciers showed this magnificent pigeon and Adele took a photo of it with her phone so this is the portrait of the pigeon and I took a photo of Adele taking a photo of the pigeon and that photo is included in this exhibition.
Click on the link below for more details about the opening of this exhibition:
OFFLINE: The 3rd Artmossphere Biennale Of Street Wave opens this Thursday August 30th at Vinzavod in Moscow.
BSA is in Moscow as curators of 50+ international artists in the Artmossphere Biennale 2018 for its 3rd edition called Street Art Wave. Till the end of the month we’ll working with a stellar cross section of people involved with Urban Art/Street Art/Graffiti at curious and fascinating intersections. We’re meeting with Street Artists, academics, collectors, gallerists, museum curators, organizers, and thoughtful pontificators of all sorts in studio, on the street, behind the scenes, and on display. Come with us!
This year’s biennale is directly inspired by our collective reactions of dissatisfaction to our daily experience of being invaded by digital content and all the artists have been charged with reclaiming a creative life “OFFLINE”. Two of the Street Artists invited to exhibit here in Moscow, Pablo Harymbat of Buenos Aires, Argentina and Lucy McLauchlan of Birmingham, UK, return to hand making tools and techniques that are distinctly separate from the digital.
Naturally, a self-imagined and eclectic DIY practice like graffiti and Street Art is born from such ingenuity and both artists showed us their custom created wooden/hardware tools with a definite degree of pride and delight.
Typically associated with a fluid curvilinear geometric formation of her expression on huge murals and canvasses, McLaughlin comes to Artmossphere with a true-to-nature technique by literally printing canvasses with trees. Using local Moscow trees on the street and in the 1,000-hectare Khimki Forest that lies within the city (said the third largest in-city forest and ecosystem in the world), Lucy and her small team used a custom-made trough on wheels to cart her acrylic paint around to reach the trees.
“It was such a good trolley that the great team of Artmossphere built for me! It went off the road on the dirt track,” she says as she shows us the multi-brush contraption she used to add the paint across a film on the surface of the bark before wrapping the tree with her linen canvasses. The resulting patterns and masking with white echo her usual geometric interpretations of rhythm and energy, but being so close to natural systems has had a strong effect on her and in comes across in this temporary studio in an architectural art university.
“I think I’m always following the abstract way from the direct form,” she says. “Here literally I’m stealing the organic form directly instead of letting it try to go through me and come out in my own way. Here I am putting it directly into the work – which I feel like I’ve been trying to do for quite a long time. I feel this kind of fits for the theme of OFFLINE.”
Similarly, Mr. Harymbat is known for his interpretations of energetic impulses and electricity-like tubes of banded color that course quickly across his murals and canvasses in organically, optically challenging and pleasing ways.
Here Pablo is using the handful of days that are leading up to Thursday’s opening of the exhibition to illustrate a process of creation and recreation with a wheel-shaped multi-brush tool that has a handle in the center like a warriors’ shield. Sweeping across the freestanding arch shaped wall in a full-body fluid gestural way, he captures the outlines for his multi-colored liquid energy tubes and fills the new shapes with paint capturing the evolution for a future stop-action video.
We have the opportunity to see the creative process as it plays out, each swing and swoop recorded by eye and hand, flooded with energetic hue with the warmth of humanly attentive intimacy. Absent is the rumbling of the street here deep in the earth where this exhibition space once sheltered perhaps hundreds of thousands of bottles of wine. Using these custom handmade wooden tools Harymbat is continuously in a tactile relationship with his materials as well as their resulting artworks.
It’s part of the fascinating world that you inhabit when you follow street art – you have no idea what you will discover in any city at any time because of it’s LIVE daily evolutionary personality. Here in Moscow we don’t see so much of the improvisational extra-legal type of works that characterize cities like Rio or Berlin or Paris, but we have been seeing a bunch of familiar international names in the last few days. Here are some shots of stuff we’ve found – much of it that you will also recognize – along with some great local Moscow stuff.
We’ll bring you more of the scene at the Artmossphere Biennale this week as artists and curators like us are arriving right now at the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art. We’ve already seen Faith XLVII, FAUST, Adele, Martha Cooper, CaneMorto, Cedar Lewisohn … As the lounge singers say, “We’ll be here all week folks”. Don’t forget to tip your waitress.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring 0331c, Ben Eine, C215, Felipe Pantone, Haculla, Interenzni Kazki, Jan & JS, Losaer, N888K, Neue, Stasdobry, The RUS Crew, Theo Lopez, Tristan Eaton, Vasya, and WK Interact.
They could have called it “Smoke & Mirrors”. Now you see him, now you don’t.
Instead the name of the new exhibition about the British Street Artist Banksy here in Moscow is posed by the organizers as a question – “Genius Or Vandal? It’s Up To You!”
Absent of a substantial collection of original pieces of art, the exhibition relies heavily on print editions (some of the editions higher numbers), blown up oversized photographs and a multi screened multi-media video montage in a darkened spooky area that may impart a sense of Street Art’s original transgressive nature to visitors. There don’t appear to be any masterpieces, but its hard to say.
In order to fill the enormous entire second floor of the venue, Central House Of Artists located in Gorky Park in Central Moscow, the organizers printed large photos taken of the actual original works placed on the streets of England, The USA and Palestine. There isn’t a problem with the photographic material, and many of them are of good quality but the show isn’t advertised as an exhibition of street art photography.
The naming of the show and its description implies that this is a solo exhibition of Banksy, actually, and not only is a large percentage of space taken for documentation of the work, the Instagram account attributed to the anonymous artist has recently announced that Banksy has no involvement in it whatsoever. In reality these are finer distinctions that the majority of visitors will care little about.
Spare yourself the incredulity; this is a marketing exercise and entertainment show meant to draw a general audience to view the works of Banksy, his greater ideas, his wit, and his politics. In the process the show acquaints them with the general practice of Street Art, and very possibly strengthens the value of his works on the market and in private collections. Truthfully, we are no more assured of Banksy’s or his teams’ involvement / disinvolvement in this show than we are of his hands performing the spraying of stencils on walls or animating stuffed animals in the back of a truck. In this way anonymity has a slew of benefits, and the veracity of any public statements attributed to him must necessarily also be viewed with at least a little suspicion.
If successful, and by unofficial count “Genius or Vandal?” has drawn between a third to a half million visitors, it will probably be packaged as a mobile exhibition and go on the road like the one by his former Manager Steve Lazarides “The Art of Banksy”, which is currently in Toronto, after being shown in Melbourne, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv and Auckland. If this indeed has drawn half a million visitors, that would mean roughly 1 in 26 of Moscow’s 13.2 million inhabitants have seen the show.
And this is as much a show (or more) as it is an exhibition. To augment the slim collection of original works the organizers created a video montage that is splashy and attractive; a sort of a retrospective in 20 minutes that is lengthened because every slide or animation with text has to be shown twice, in English and in Russian. The designers of the exhibition create a series of environments or installations meant to be evocative of the margins of metropolis – cargo pallets, metal drums, street cones and a recreation of what we imagine is the artists’ studio as featured in the movie “Exit Through The Gift Shop”. It’s an edgy theme park feeling for everyday folks as well, meant to imbue the show with an aura of authenticity and street cred.
Along the way visitors can also learn about his political opinions and forays into Israel/Palestine/Bethlehem, his sorrowful Dismaland theme park, his general upending of pleasant conventions and his deeper commitment to social justice. Cheesy as it might be, this show isn’t a bad introduction to Banksy the person and Banksy the brand, and if he has no involvement with this it can be argued that it is still beneficial in some ways.
Yes there’s a gift shop as well, naturally, as you exit the show.
BSA is in Moscow as curators of 50+ international artists in the Artmossphere Biennale 2018 for its 3rd edition called Street Art Wave. Till the end of the month we’ll working with a stellar cross section of people involved with Urban Art/Street Art/Graffiti at curious and fascinating intersections. We’re meeting with Street Artists, academics, collectors, gallerists, museum curators, organizers, and thoughtful pontificators of all sorts in studio, on the street, behind the scenes, and on display. Come with us!
Ask most Street Artists looking for fame and they’ll tell you it is a bonifide space race out there – looking for the right wall that gets the best exposure to peers and fans is key to winning. Tristan Eaton is launching his murals around the world this summer – including New York’s famed Houston/Bowery wall and this cosmonaut themed installation that has landed in a heavily trafficked section of Moscow’s inner ring.
It’s part of a project called The Artrium that has been inviting high profile international and Russian Street Artists to paint this summer. We hear news that more Americans will touchdown before cold weather arrives, including Futura and Shepard Fairey in September.
BSA is in Moscow as curators of 50+ international artists in the Artmossphere Biennale 2018 for its 3rd edition called Street Art Wave. Till the end of the month we’ll working with a stellar cross section of people involved with Urban Art/Street Art/Graffiti at curious and fascinating intersections. We’re meeting with Street Artists, academics, collectors, gallerists, museum curators, organizers, and thoughtful pontificators of all sorts in studio, on the street, behind the scenes, and on display. Come with us!
Last week we featured several photographs from Martha Cooper of WK Interact while they were both participating at the 20x21EUG Mural Project in Eugene, Oregon. So naturally we were surprised to see him jumping from rooftops here in Moscow – or more appropriately maybe he was para-troopering down from the sky, having been dropped by a plane. As he does.
No surprise here, Martha is on her way to Moscow as well!
BSA is in Moscow as curators of 50+ international artists in the Artmossphere Biennale 2018 for its 3rd edition called Street Art Wave. Till the end of the month we’ll working with a stellar cross section of people involved with Urban Art/Street Art/Graffiti at curious and fascinating intersections. We’re meeting with Street Artists, academics, collectors, gallerists, museum curators, organizers, and thoughtful pontificators of all sorts in studio, on the street, behind the scenes, and on display. Come with us!
BSA has just arrived in the home of the Kremlin and while waiting 5 hours for a hotel room to become available after the 10 hour plane trip we hit the streets to capture whatever we could find – hopefully without walking directly into traffic because of the deliriously heavy jet lag.
None of the Artmossphere artists who will be creating and installing have arrived yet here, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing fun to see on the Street Art scene in the capital and most populous city of Russia (13.2 million).
Earlier in the year we spent some time with Ben Eine in Colombia so imagine our surprise when turning a corner we saw this welcoming sign in his signature letters looming high and bright – reaffirming to us that YES we are indeed in the right place at the right time here in Moscow.
Organizers at Artmossphere are calling this new mural in Russia the largest mural in the world. They say that representatives of the Guinness World Records are considering its inclusion in the collection of world records.
Celebrating the 260th anniversary of the metallurgical plant in Vyksa and the 25th anniversary of the United Metallurgical Company (OMK), the Moscow based painter, street artist and a graffiti-writer Misha Most and five assistants took 35 days to paint this 10,800 square meter mural this spring. Presented to the public as part of the urban art festival ArtOvrag in Vyksa, Russia.
Thematically, Mr. Most says he looked to stories in science fiction a half century ago – many about our current time. It includes elements related to scientists, chemistry, psychology, robotics, androids – basically stuff you see today going to the shopping mall, ad agency, or factory floor.
“I included into the scheme six stories taken from the past and present of the Vyksa smelter,” says the artist. “I think the workers can easily recognize them. If you look at the wall from left to right, you can grasp the development of the plot: from small – to greater, from research – to creation, from idea to result.”
Organized by the Artmossphere Studio creative association, who continuously are pushing the boundaries of street culture, high culture, and community engagement, the winning mural was chosen from 260 applications from 34 countries to the “Vyksa 10000” open competition and juried by artists, designers and architects.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1.Vegan Flava. Throwing Leaves Against Machines.
2. Andrew Hem “Misty Blue”
3. Laura Llaneli: 12 + 1 in Barcelona 4. Misha Most. Evolution -2. The largest mural in the world. Vyksa, Russia
5. Agnès Varda JR’s Faces Places (Visages, Villages). Trailer.
BSA Special Feature: Vegan Flava. Throwing Leaves Against Machines.
“We are exploring crossroads where different creative paths such as painting, video-making, dancing and music meet,” Vegan Flava tells us about this new collaborative performance he has just completed with his friend Mario Perez Amigo.
They call it “Throwing Leaves Against Machines” and it is the third video chapter of a series named Northern Street Sketches. This painting and dance performance took play at Subtopia in the Botkyrka municipality of Stockholm – the city where both artists hail from.
Taking place the same night that Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Paris agreement on climate change, Vegan Flava tells us that the video is “a climate action performance addressing the costs consumerism today imposes on future generations, and time is limited.”
Andrew Hem “Misty Blue”
Street culture and impressionism filter into the singular form compositions of Los Angeleno Andrew Ham. In this hand painted mural with The Avenue Concept in Providence, he tells the story of a child he met. The artist shoes how he mixes paint and speaks of his practice of going far from the wall to make sure the mural “reads” well from a distance.
Laura Llaneli: 12 + 1 in Barcelona
Back in June we showed you process photos of this wall in Barcelona in a posting entitled Laura Llaneli “OUR ACTIONS BECOMING THE POLICY”. It is an interesting concept of translating a short speech, a tirade actually, of a singer upbraiding audience members for not fitting his image of them -as if his self-image was derived from the audience. True, mom always said, “Show me your friends and I can tell you what kind of person you are.”
Misha Most. Evolution -2. The largest mural in the world. Vyksa, Russia
Periodically you hear a claim of a mural being the largest. This one by Misha Most with the folks from Artmossphere looks pretty close!
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BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
