Specter and Various & Gould have a show opening on Saturday at Brooklynite Gallery. The opening is on March 20th from 7-10, and the show runs through April 17th. Specter is one of the most interesting street artists working today in New York, and I can’t wait to see what he has made for this show.
From Brooklynite Gallery:
The concept of “work” can be interpreted in many different ways depending on whom you hit up. Brooklyn-based artist, SPECTER and German duo VARIOUS & GOULD have each located discarded materials, used skill and ingenuity and re-conceptualized things in pulsating ways you might never have imagined. All this done in effort to turn the concept of “work” on its ear in an exhibition appropriately titled, “Make It Fit”.
Cart-pushers, delivery boys and slave-laborers – take the spotlight in much of the work created by the artist who goes simply by the name Specter. With all of his portraits based on real people living at the bottom of the capitalist barrel, Specter forces the general public to see what they might rather not – those who got left behind. Collecting materials in much the same fashion his subjects do, Specter incorporates shopping carts, bicycles, and crates along with engaging images of your everyday worker, paying special attention to what makes them tick. His work is hand-crafted, retro-fitted, clever and fresh.
For the creative team of Various & Gould the concept of “work” means looking well beyond the vigor of the everyday tasks one has to perform for a paycheck and instead focusing on the surprisingly graceful interaction between a laborer and his tools. Imagine peering into the cut-out holes we often see at a construction site and being exposed to a vibrant world of multi-colored uniforms, enlarged tools and graphic text. A world where workers trade body parts depending on their needs, moving in tandem while performing their repetitive tasks in a choreographed “workers waltz”. Using found objects, work related symbols and their refined silkscreen techniques, the line between work and play becomes blurred inside the imaginative minds of Various & Gould.
Brooklynite Gallery is located at 334 Malcolm X Blvd., Brooklyn, New York 11233. We are open Thursday thru Saturday from 1pm – 7pm or by appointment. We are located 2 blocks from the A or C subway to Utica Ave. stop.
I’m leaving for Zambia today. I’ll be visiting Shitima School in Kabwe. For Vandalog, this means two things: 1. I probably won’t have any internet access until I return (on March 25th) so I won’t be able to post anything new or respond to emails and 2. I’m visiting Shitima as part of an art project with two of my favorite artists, so there will be plenty of videos and photos to post once I’m back in London.
For most of the days I’m in Zambia, I’ve scheduled something to appear on Vandalog, but if Banksy reveals himself or Shepard Fairey gets sued (again) while I’m away, don’t expect to read about it here for a few days (unless Elisa or Gaia post about it).
Way back in December, I had the privilege to meet and interview Martha Cooper while she was photographing the artists at Primary Flight. Here’s the video from that day:
Martha Cooper’s photos from that video can be found in the books Subway Art and Street Play. Subway Art is a must-have for anyone interested in street art or graffiti, and I haven’t seen Street Play in person, but it looks interesting and is one of the next books I intend to buy.
This piece outside of Camden Underground Station in London has made me smile like few recent street art projects have. It’s by Contra, a name I’ve not heard before. Hopefully we’ll see more from this artist.
This artwork by 2:12 might not be the best stencil ever technically, and it might not be the most original image, but it’s an impressive piece of street art. Why? Great placement. Here’s what 2:12 found one day in Galveston, Texas:
2:12 didn’t just put up a random artwork in that hole in the wall, he made a site-specific artwork that works perfectly with the space. And when it comes to street art, that can make all the difference.
CircleCulture Gallery’s group show There Is No Such Thing As A Good Painting About Nothing opened on Friday evening. The show includes work from three artists: Marco “Pho” Grassi, Holly Thoburn and Katrin Fridriks. Holly knows I’m not her biggest fan, though her paintings are nice as decorative pieces, but Pho’s art is very interesting, and I’ve heard amazing things about what Katrin does and can’t wait to see some of her paintings in person.
From CircleCulture:
A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art – and shifted the art world’s focus. Never a formal association, the artists known as “Abstract Expressionists” or “The New York School” did, however, share some common assumptions. Among others, artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko advanced audacious formal inventions in a search for significant content. Breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter, the artists made monumentally scaled works that stood as reflections of their individual psyches – and in doing so, attempted to tap into universal inner sources. These artists valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to process.
The exhibition “There is No Such Thing As a Good Painting About Nothing“ focuses a comparable artistic habitus finding its provenance in graffiti and street culture. It is interesting to observe, that approximately 70 years later, in the early 21st century, three artists located in different countries developed their work independently from each other as a new form of abstract expressionism. They build upon the paradigms of graffiti writing and street art but distance themselves radically from established clichés. Ultimately, by doing so, they generate an avant-garde direction within the genre of urban art.
Marco “Pho” Grassi (Milan) translates his background as a bomber to his vast abstract paintings by referring to graffiti writing’s traditional elements: the word, the rhythm of the line and a performing dynamism. By recovering elements from the daily life like torn manifestos and wooden pallets he postulates an hommage to the street.
Katrin Fridrik’s (Paris) works bring a third dimension, which modernizes abstract expressionism and reinstates it for our times. She invents a new pictorial language: the “human-generated” computer images. And she shows us that the human still produces better than the machine.
Holly Thoburn (London) has traveled the world extensively, photographing street art, graffiti, derelict walls, alleys and doorways – all of which find their abstracted way back into her work as themes and motifs of urban living.
James Jessop’s latest solo show, Beauty and The Beast, opens this Friday (March 19th) at High Roller Society in London. I’m very bummed that I’ll be out of the country for the opening of this show (more on that in a few days). Honestly, I don’t care for the painting that HRS has put in the press release, but usually I really enjoy James’ artwork. Demonology and Subway Ghosts are two of my personal favorites. Beauty and The Beast will only have four paintings in the entire show, but James’ paints on a pretty huge scale.
From High Roller Society:
After recent solo exhibitions in São Paulo and Copenhagen, four of James Jessop’s finest works will see their UK debut at High Roller Society, the newest gallery to London’s progressive East end. Titled BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, this solo show reveals Jessop’s trademark style: large-scale spoof horror paintings that present a visual feast of transcribed B-movie posters, 60s sex/sleaze paperback book covers, and 1980s New York subway graffiti. The exhibition launches on Friday, 19 March 2010, with the release of a limited edition 5 colour screen print based on his notorious King Kong painting series.
Jessop burst into the London art scene in 2004 with terrifying impact at Charles Saatchi’s infamous New Blood exhibition which featured an epic 5 metre-long panoramic painting entitled Horrific. Since then, Jessop‘s repercussions have continued with bigger and bolder studio work and a consistently strong dual street presence through his own rigorous dealings in graffiti. “My whole life has been mixing up graffiti with high art,” he states, “the message in my work is to make a painting that has huge impact”. Jessop feeds off of his obsession with certain sub-cultural movements, such as graffiti and drum n’ bass, the energy of which fuels his work, regardless of where it is executed. “It is never ending, I love this way of life, painting everyday, doing graffiti at night… I am living my dream.”
A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Jessop’s energy is nonetheless skillfully controlled and highly focussed. Every minute area in each of his paintings is considered in order to achieve the best visual effects. Varied impasto textures, fluid brush strokes, vibrant colour combinations, and delicate glazing techniques are executed differently throughout each piece, and help to emphasize the texture of every element in the composition. Jessop’s painting approach and many of his intertwined components are clearly influenced by key movements throughout art history such as the Renaissance, the Baroque, and Futurism. Yet, like a B-movie needs junk food, Jessop’s cross-movement style integrates Uni Posca paint pens, spray-can effects, and the familiarly bizarre imagery of popular culture.
Jessop’s big-screen works were recently part of the Animals Contemporary Visions exhibition held at the Martini Arte Internazionale in Turin, where he was subsequently invited to be the 2010 Artist in Residence at the Cultural Centre Cesare Martini, in Cavagnolo, Italy. Before undertaking this venture later in the year, James Jessop’s frightfully astonishing selection of works to date will be showcased at High Roller Society until 24 April.
Last week, Carmichael Gallery took over the Ogilvy & Mather offices in New York for Re-creation II, a show with installations and/or paintings from Will Barras, Simon Birch, Boxi, Ethos, Mark Jenkins, Labrona, Aakash Nihalani, Nina Pandolfo and WK Interact. The show will be on until the end of July, so there’s plenty of time to stop by if you’re in New York.
Ethos
Will Barras
All these Aakash Nihalani artworks look great next to each other:
Aakash Nihalani
Labrona
Boxi
My favorite part of Re-Creation II has to be all of the things that WK Interact did:
The next show at New Image Art is Desaturated, a solo show from Retna. The show opens March 20th. It looks like the artworks are similar to this photo (maybe NSFW). Some people love Retna, some don’t, but what really can’t be argued is his influence on the LA graffiti scene.
Retna was born in Los Angeles, California in 1979. Since first creating a name for himself in the early 1990s, Retna has become an “eternal broadcaster” of sorts, shining a light to the kinetic urban soul of Los Angeles. The name RETNA itself evokes the timeless power, movement and visual vibrancy behind the artist’s acclaimed work. His work merges photography with graffiti style and paint, time with color, couture with street culture, the spiritual with the sensual, and fluidity with grit. Whether his paintings hang in a gallery or wall on the streets of Los Angeles, they serve as a retina through which we view the urban journal of contemporary art.
At an early age, Retna was introduced to L.A.’s mural culture. While still in high school, he led one of the largest and most innovative graffiti art collectives the city has witnessed. He is perhaps best known for appropriating fashion advertisements and amplifying them with his unique layering, intricate line work, text-based style and incandescent color palette reflecting an eclectic artistic tradition. RETNA became just as notorious for his ornate painting technique as his timeless style: he used paintbrushes mixed with the traditional spray can. Many of his pieces synthesize the line between fine art and graffiti, between power and opposition, between tradition and advancement.
Today, Retna traverses between the galleries and streets with ease. Retna is a member of the Art Work Rebels and Mad Society Kings Art Groups. In December 2007, he contributed to a large-scale mural project with El Mac and Reyes called “La Reina del Sur” at Miami’s Primary Flight during Art Basel. His most recent projects include an exhibition titled “Vagos Y Reinas” at Robert Berman Gallery and a mural called “Seeing Signs” at the Margulies Warehouse for Primary Flight.
PaperMonster has a beautiful new print available called True Identity. The print is 5 colors, measures 18″x24″, is an edition of 50 and costs $45. It’s available online at Abztract.
and 
. Subway Art is a must-have for anyone interested in street art or graffiti, and I haven’t seen Street Play in person, but it looks interesting and is one of the next books I intend to buy.
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