RAS Gallery Barcelona . Carrer Doctor Dou 10
Opening Friday April 13th from 7.30 till 10 pm
Exhibition runs from April 13th till May 12th
Curated by Maximiliano Ruiz
“In 2007 the Spanish building industry used 54.2 million tones of cement. This factoid did not escape the thoughtful attentions of one very interesting Galician digital nomad, namely Isaac Cordal. Cordal saw this frenzied ‘cementisation’ of the world around him as evidence of our deep alienation from an ongoing conflict with the natural environment. So, being an artist very much obsessed with the problem of the human body Cordal appropriated cement as the tool for his own intervention in the built environment. What this means in laymen’s terms is that he used cement to make his art and in this case his art was sculptures of little people.”
Gary Shove
“Blink and you’ll miss it. Turning the urban landscape in on itself with installations that are almost to subtle to be noticed while passing by in an individualistic frenzy, Isaac Cordal uses the grey functionality of cement to question the lack of colour and vibrancy in so much of our lives through his tiny figures.”
Street Art Utopia
“Creator of a tiny community of cement sculptures hidden and isolated around the city, Isaac Cordal invites us to reflect on the sad state of the world through his art. It holds a mirror up to society by recreating scenes of our everyday modern life reminding us of the numb passage of time, the overwhelming influence of consumerism and elimination of nature. Keep your eyes open!”
Street Art London
Street Artist and sculptor Isaac Cordal installed new work on a recent visit to his native town of Galicia in Spain. As much a project about photography as sculpture, it is an illuminating trip to follow his little grey men while they interact with the world. With his impeccable sense of placement and capture, instant storylines emerge just because of their context. Vulnerable, engaging, sometimes pessimistic, or quietly reflective, Cordal’s cement vignettes always look like these cement fellows are caught in the middle of a stream of activity they didn’t quite elect. Ultimately, the impact lies in the artists imagination, and yours.
Here are exclusive images of the new work for BSA readers (along with our witty and insightful captions).
Today is traditionally a day of shopping here in New York but we don’t have much coin to spare, so what’s next on the agenda? It is sunny and fresh outside right now so we’re thinking of going to take a walking tour of the neighborhood – if only to process yesterdays Thanksgiving feast and the 2 pieces of pumpkin pie and whipped cream that were piled on in a Jack Daniels-induced stupor deep in the night. You could go to MoMA to see the DeKooning retrospective and at the same time the murals Diego Rivera made for the museum in the early ’30s, but that will cost you an entrance fee unless today is one of their Free Friday nights. Sometimes it is just as fun to hit the gallery of the streets, to stretch you legs and employ a bemused attitude as busy shoppers are buzzing in and out of stores keeping the economy going.
Here’s some cool stuff you may also be interested in:
1. LUDO in a Solo Show at The Garage “Super Discount” (Amsterdam)
2. “East West Connection”, curated by Arrested Motion (Hong Kong)
3. Jorge Rodriguez-Gerarda Solo Show Now Open (Barcelona)
4. Cryptic Solo on Saturday Night at Hold Up (LA)
5. David Walker “Brides on Fire”
6. “Contemporary Istanbul” An Urban and Contemporary Art Fair
7. “Surface Tension” at Ambush Gallery in Sydney
8. “Peeled, Pasted and Posted” at Gift to Gab Gallery
9. The Bishop, Augustine Kofie and Remi/Rough by Agents of Change (VIDEO)
10. “Outside In” Movie Trailer: The Story Of Arts In The Streets (VIDEO)
11. Blek le Rat 30 Years Later By Spencer Keeton Cunningham (VIDEO)
LUDO in a Solo Show at The Garage “Super Discount” (Amsterdam)
French Street Artist LUDO is having a solo show in this cool private space in Amsterdam, opening today.
For further information regarding this show click here
“East West Connection”, curated by Arrested Motion (Hong Kong)
Tanley Wong tells us about this curatorial project for an art show that he and Arrested Motion are throwing in Hong Kong. Featured in the show at Above Second Gallery is a lineup of fresh artwork from artists such as Shepard Fairey, Faile, Tomokazu “Matsu” Matsuyama, Akino Kondoh, Nick Walker and more.
Participating Artists: Luke Chueh, Faile, Shepard Fairey, Evah Fan, Stella Im Hultberg, Tat Ito, Akino Kondoh, Travis Louie, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Brendon Monroe, Edwin Ushiro, Nick Walker, and Yoskay Yamamoto.
For further information regarding this show click here
Jorge Rodriguez-Gerarda Solo Show Now Open (Barcelona)
Jorge Rodriguez-Gerarda Solo Show at the Galeria Ignacio De-Lassaletta in Barcelona, Spain opens today to the public after the official opening last night. “Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada is a founder of the New York Culture Jamming movement and an innovator in the international urban art scene. Since the late 90´s he has been replacing the faces of cultural icons chosen by advertisers with the faces of anonymous people to question the controls imposed on public space.”
JORGE RODRÍGUEZ-GERADA
SOLO EXHIBITION AT GALERÍA IGNACIO DE LASSALETTA
Opening Reception Thursday, November 24, 2011 from 7-10pm
On View November 24, 2011 – January 17, 2012
Rambla de Catalunya 47.08007 Barcelona, Spain
On Thursday November 24th, Cuban New Yorker and Barcelonaphile urban artist Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada will unveil his breathtaking and ground breaking new work at Galería Ignacio de Lassaletta. Presenting new pieces from the Urban Analogies charcoal drawing series created on 250 year old wall surfaces and the new Memorylithicssculpture series, using discarded historical architectural elements over 500 years old. All the work in this exhibition is based on the intangible memory that these materials possess and the passage of time that they portray. To celebrate the occasion a printed special edition catalogue of 1 to 500 numbered copies, including an insightful essay by Iván de la Nuez, will feature all of the exhibited works.Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada is a founder of the New York Culture Jamming movement and an innovator in the international urban art scene. Since the late 90´s he has been replacing the faces of cultural icons chosen by advertisers with the faces of anonymous people to question the controls imposed on public space, the role models designated and the type of events that are guarded by the collective memory. Rodríguez-Gerada´s unique direction was mentioned in Naomi Klein´s book No Logo and was a precursor of the use of anonymous portraits now common in street art. His spectacular interventions are created for the sake of bringing awareness to relevant social issues. His large scale time base works avoid negative impact on the environment, challenge the conformity in contemporary art and allow for a reflection that goes beyond the completion of the piece to focus in its concept, process, and the metaphor that comes forth because of the material chosen.
‘In spite of the growth in time periods and dimensions, and in spite of Rodríguez-Gerada never betraying his urban condition, his work does not ‘crumble’ in a gallery. It has its own presence that doesn’t really listen to a change of scale, nor acts as a mini-sized version of his usual work pattern. Like in all his itinerary, the point is to move a world into another world, a time into a different time, a meaning into an altogether ‘other’ meaning. For this, his pieces behave like a ready-made solution, willing to pay their debts with Art in general and with Urban Art in particular. Is it calling on Banksy or Blu? Both, but also on Duchamp, Brancusi or Picabia, as well as from Rosalind Krauss’ ‘expanded sculptures’, from Robert Smithson or Ana Mendieta.’
Iván de la Nuez. Essayist and Curator.
“Cosmovisión Andina y los Hijos del Inti” is an approach to ancient Andean cultures, full of colour, wisdom and mysticism. Sixeart use his pictorial language in order to reinvent a new idea of ancestral reconnection.
The conceptual part in Sixes work has aroused the interest of Casa America in Madrid, where they will show an installation made specifically to coincide with ARCO and later, in March, an exhibition with all his latest work.
N2 also inform you that the gallery has published a catalogue numbered from 1 /500 to 500/500 showing that work”
With the help of French Street Artist 3TTMAN, a social fundraising/art/tshirt project in Spain called The N-spired Story Project built a homeless shelter. 3TTMAN is one of the first artists for this project, and the design of the house is super cool.
The foldable painted concept house on wheels is playfully offered as a possible solution to shelter the homeless and is colorfully striped and patterned. Did you ever see those red tents that homeless people in Paris have been living in thanks to the “Children of Don Quixote”? According to the Wikipedia page on the red-tent project, “the NGO Médecins du monde (MDM) had taken the initiative, in 2005, to give tents to all homeless people in Paris, in order to provide them with minimal privacy and to make misery visible.”
Dude, one time the Fire Department kicked everybody out of our building, which happens periodically in artist-settled buildings in Brooklyn because building codes are not even a consideration when you are building your fantasy chicken shack inside an old factory for art shows and performances and seances and what-not. Everybody had to find a new couch to sleep on pronto! But that’s only temporary homelessness, and not completely dire like a lot of people’s situations.
In artist communities like those in Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Greenpoint Brooklyn, grassroots non-profit non-corporate collectives and groups have been doing projects together for years that involve community, collaboration, joint action, and art. Street Artist Swoon used the power of community organizing and planning to hatch an idea for building the “Konbit Shelter” project in Haiti. 100% grassroots, that sustainable building project raised funds from donors and Swoon was instrumental in the conception and construction of those shelters. Currently she is working on similar community-based projects for displaced persons.
It’s uplifting and spirit-raising to see these N-spired projects pop up seemingly out of nowhere based on goodwill. According to the website of the company that created it, the project is part of a PR/marketing campaign in the “Social” space, perhaps for clients like those listed on their site. According to the materials on the site, a percentage of proceeds from this project go to charity.
If you wish to learn more about the project The N-spired Story click on the link below:
French Street Artist JR is in Los Angeles for a few weeks to wheat-paste twenty or more murals from “Wrinkles in the City”, a black and white portrait series featuring colossal visages of the mature angels in this city.
In a metropolis that famously avoids wrinkles, whether celluloid hero or not, plastering enormous creased and cratered kissers across architectural facades and rooftops is tantamount to vandalism. All of this seems perfect for the 28 year old former graffeur from Paris, who won the 2011 TED prize and who has previously installed portions of this project in Shanghai and Cartegena.
Intended to be visible from streets and freeways, the series continues the Street Artists’ previous work; photographs that pay gentle tribute to the daily lives of citizens, elevating the “everyday” to an outsized scale normally reserved for celebrity and sales.
LA-based BSA collaborator and enormously talented photographer Todd Mazer has captured some of JR’s recent installations here exclusively for you.
Volando vengo volando voy – Exposición de Rodrigo Villas en a galería Cosmo del 16 de Octubre al 12 de Noviembre
Rodrigo Villas es de Rio de Janeiro y vive desde hace 4 años en Barcelona, un tiempo durante el cual ha profundizado en su trabajo con grafitti e ilustración y, en la búsqueda de territorios comunes se encuentra la obra de esta exposición.
En la presentación de sus personajes hay un trabajo de múltiples materiales, escalas y formatos; desde la madera hasta la tela con preferencia por los botes de spray acrílico.
Un trabajo también con formas limpias, sin aristas, con piezas que unas veces componen puzles donde prima la geometría y el color y otras se reconvierten en nuevos personajes.
La mayoría son personajes que se abstraen de su entorno, no hay casi nunca un escenario y si lo hay, tiene mucho de ensoñación y de juego. Imágenes recurrentes son las nubes recortadas, los barcos y la presencia de los pájaros, esos Love Birds que vienen del trabajo en la calle y que encontramos como piezas individuales y también como bandadas de pájaros multiplicadas hasta el infinito.
Un conjunto de trabajos con un lenguaje propio, con sentido del humor y que reflejan en su conjunto algo parecido a la letra de la canción de la que tomó prestado el título: enamorado de la vida aunque a veces duela.
The vastness of the world can become limited by the familiar as we march or stumble or crawl mindlessly through the habitual behaviors of day-to-day existence, creatures of habit as we are. With the simple act of miniaturization and thoughtful placement, London based Spanish street artist Issac Cordal magically expands the imagination of pedestrians finding his sculptures on the street. With the master touch of a stage director, his figures are placed in locations that quickly open doors to other worlds that you don’t know of, but evidently exist.
Issac Cordal "Home" Brussels, Belgium. 2010
“Cement Eclipses”, is a project of small cement sculptures that began while Cordal studied fine arts in Pontevedra, Spain in the early 2000s. Meant as a critique of the rapid overdevelopment (and subsequent public debt hangover) of the Spanish coast over the last decade, “The figurines represent a kind of metamorphosis through which an urban human leaves his role of citizen and begins merging with the city and slowly becomes part of urban furniture,” explains the artist. More broadly the installations can be interpreted as post-modern alienation, complete with feelings of dislocation in the built environment.
Isaac Cordal, “Climate Change Survivor”. Hackney, London. 2010
Some figures march lock step with slumped shoulders single file, overwhelmed and pummeled into conformity. Single figures freeze bewildered in an artificial environment of concrete, molded plastic, and urban residue. Singular men and women are suspended and isolated in a motion or pose that can take on multiple meanings. The sympathetic figures are easy to relate to and to laugh with; meticulously placed in scenes that provide a looking glass into a world strangely akin to your own. Describing the characters and the world they live in, the artist talks about urban man’s “voluntary isolation and alienation from nature, hiding himself among sidewalks, streets, walls,” and you can almost feel sorry for the figurines. And you might knowingly chuckle.
Isaac Cordal "Businessman" Brussels, Belgium. 2010
Isaac Cordal “Border” Hackney, London. 2010
Isaac Cordal “Lost” Hackney, London 2010
Isaac Cordal "Follow The Leader" Brussels, Belgium. 2010
Isaac Cordal “Public Swimming Pool” London, UK. 2010
Isaac Cordal “Parasite” Shoreditch, London. 2010
Isaac Cordal “Empty Fridge” Brussels, Belgium. 2010
Opening Thursday September 9th from 7.30 till 10 pm
RAS Gallery Barcelona . Carrer Doctor Dou 10
Like everything else that’s good in life, Graffiti kills. It’s the gas in the spray cans, the chemicals in the inks, the sleepless nights spent obsessing about new ideas and days wasted wandering the train tracks…
Working together for the first time in a Catalonian gallery, French graffiti writers Bomk, Dran and Sowat of the Da Mental Vaporz crew, are willing to share their last will with Europe’s Street Art Mecca. Hopefully, the show will be filled with their usual hyper realistic sexual beasts, disillusioned children’s’ drawings, vandalized sketches, dripping calligraphies, crossed out black and white pictures and whatever else they may have in store for us.
Bronx Tats Cru muralists How and Nosm Perre hit Brooklyn last week with their buddy Aryz to put up a new piece on the side of a deli while stray cats wandered out from the fence next door to take a look. While BSA watched, the guys climbed up and down ladders and showed solid technique like the pros they are.
The globe trotting twins, born in seaside San Sebastion in the Basque region of Spain, grew up in Dusseldorf and fell in love with the New York style of graffiti in their teens. When they joined the Tats Cru in New York in the late nineties they had already proved their skillz as graff artists and begun to explore Street Art and muralist technique.
With Aryz visiting from Barcelona it was a perfect time to hit the streets of Williamsburg and get a piece up before the skies darkened further. “Death of an Era” appears to pay tribute to some of hiphop and graffiti culture’s early icons and surround them with a rising tide of blood. A critique of the darker powers of commercialism, it may also be homage to a romantic vision of a dirty and dysfunctional city that increasingly looks Disneyfied. While homogeneity threatens the character of some of our neighborhoods, work like this ensures an expression of individuality that keeps the streets alive.
With one eye on an impending summer storm and another on their wall, the guys busily consulted sketches and wielded their cans in a race against time.
R e n e A l m a n z a (México) . S o l o S h o w
paintings . drawings . graphics
Vernissage June 10th from 7.30 till 10 pm
RAS Gallery Barcelona . Carrer Doctor Dou 10
From Monterrey Mexico and for the very first time in Europe, the work
of Rene Almanza arrives to RAS Gallery Barcelona. Convoluted lines
that show but also hide faces, bodies and animals, extracted from the
many worlds that Rene Almanza materializes melting his own urban and
poetic influences, mark the artist solo exhibition.
The paintings, drawings and graphic works presented review a wide
range of prices, inviting all art lovers to take one of Rene Almanza’s
unique works home.
” Every time I see the work of Rene Almanza I feel a mixture of love and hate.
I realize that he is a quiet person in whose drawings lives some a kind of
struggle with the paper that gives life to his strokes, making it sometimes, to
seem to go beyond the square surface limits. ”
Herbert Baglione
– Presents from the artist to the first 150 guests
– Oficial video, pictures, press-kits and more info more information on www.subenysuben.com/blog
In her latest mural, Faring Purth delivers a powerful reflection on connection, continuity, and the complexity of evolving relationships—a true …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
Did you ever see those red tents that homeless people in Paris have been living in thanks to the 
