Some things need to be seen in person. In terms of massive murals, a picture may be able to transmit small details of a piece and/or the overall wall, but not both at the same time. Hyuro‘s new wall is no exception, so while I am providing several detail shots, it is probably impossibly difficult to get a decent picture of Hyuro’s 271 meter (889 foot) long mural in Copenhagen as a whole.

Hyuro recently had a solo show in Copenhagen. What dazzles me about Hyuro is this cross between slides of an animation and public murals. Despite the fact that she must have painted dozens of deer, the pieces translates as one deer running through a forest. Hyruro has done several murals that seem like stagnant frames of an animation or motion picture, and frankly it’s incredibly that movement translates so well through a mural. While I have not been fortunate enough to see her work in person, I can only imagine what it would be like to walk down this street in Copenhagen and see this mural animate itself.

Photos by Henrik Haven

Drawing for the Masses is a group show of about a dozen international street showing, not just any drawings, but personal drawings and prepatory sketches that would be the blueprints for eventual murals. While a rough sketch of an existing mural may not seem that exiting, 999 Gallery assures you that these works are sometimes more precious to the artist than the public work since these were not intended for others to see. So, stop by to see see the personal work of 108, AndrecoBorondo, Gaia, 2501, Guy Denning, Hitnes, Lucamaleonte, Martina Merlini, Moneyless, Ozmo and Tellas.

The show opened last night in Rome’s 999 Gallery.

Artist Unknown

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Aline Mairet, a street art blogger and photographer based on in Montréal. Check out her blog here.

Here’s an idea of what you could found when you walk on the streets and alleyways of Montréal. When street art wakes up after a long, cold, snowy winter, the artists bring colour and beauty to the streets. Here is the work of Anser, Labrona, Gawd, Produkt, Chris Dyer, Qbnyc, 500M, Waxhead, Omen, 52Hz, Stikki Peaches, Listen, Wzrds gang and Stela. 

Anser

Labrona and Gawd

Produkt

Mathieu Connery aka 500M

Waxhead

Omen

52Hz, Stikki Peaches and Listen

Stikki Peaches

Gawd

Wzrds gang and Stela

Artist Unknown

And this last piece, a splendid door by Labrona. A commission for En Masse.

Labrona

Photos by Aline Mairet

I’m super excited today to talk about this print that NoseGo is doing with 1xRun. The good folks at 1xRun asked me for a few ideas of who I thought would be a good fit for them, and NoseGo immediately came to mind. And then, I saw this painting (Tall Tales) posted on NoseGo’s Instagram and thought “God, I hope whatever he does for 1xRun is as good as this.” I don’t usually love NoseGo’s pieces that include dinosaurs, but I do love Tall Tales (okay, I guess the Loch Ness Monster isn’t a dinosaur but you get my point). I especially like the little TV character. Tall Tales is an all-around strong image from a young artist whose work I’ve really fallen in love with over the last year or so. NoseGo says the painting “is based on ideas of folklore and story telling between generations.”

The print version of Tall Tales will be available starting today at 1xRun for $50. The print is an edition of 50 and measures 14 x 18 inches.

That guy that paints letters has an upcoming show in LA called Innocence, at CGH Circa (a new art venue from the people at Corey Helford Gallery at 8530-A Washington Boulevard in Culver City). The show opens on June 15th at 7pm and will run until July 13th. The show will feature letters painted in such a way that calls attention to the relationship between art and vandalism, and that’s why the show is called Innocence.

Photos courtesy of Corey Helford Gallery

Toronto is a vibrant, culturally diverse, and immensely creative city, with a strong arts community. Graffiti culture started growing in the 80’s, with the most notable artist being Ren, who is still considered a pioneer in our city and beyond. Since then, Graffiti has been a visible and established part of Toronto. For as long as I can remember, Rush Lane aka Graff Alley has always been comprised of blocks of walls coated in paint, full of new and exciting pieces to find.

Young Jarus and Skam

Read the rest of this article »

This event sounds amazing. Between the hype in New York, London, Los Angeles and Paris, Vienna has enthusiastically been trying to put itself on the map in the global street art scene. The history of the city is one that has shown support of international street art for years but all that suddenly seems fairly small-scale in comparison to this festival. Cash, Cans & Candy has invited some of the big names of street artists (Shepard Fairey, Faile, Retna, Roa, Robbie Connal, Jaz, Dan Witz, etc) as well as some newer or lesser known talent to paint 800 meters (a half mile) of wall space around Vienna.

Shepard finished his wall at the end of May. Kicking the festival off with Shepard was probably a smart move in setting the tone for the rest of the events. The space he was given to work with definitely suited his style and the image is beautiful but I don’t think he incorporated the existing architecture as much as he could have. You can catch Faile painting their wall on June 20th.

The gallery exhibition of the same name at Galerie Hilger Next looks worth seeing. They’ve posted photos of a number of the exhibited works here.

The festival closes September 13th. To keep up with the ongoing events, including talks, tours, workshops, performances and block parties, check out the Cash, Cans & Candy Facebook page.

Photos courtesy of Cash, Cans & Candy

Pure Evil is one of the familiar faces of the British street art scene both for his own art and for The Pure Evil Gallery that he runs in Shoreditch. Tim Hans met with Pure Evil at his gallery/studio for the latest in our continuing series of photo-portraits of artists by Tim, and Caroline asked Pure Evil about art and his gallery.

Caroline: Do you think it’s important for artists to have a sort of trademark or logo? 

Pure Evil: No, I think artists who stick to the same recognizable thing and just do it again and again are being boring. This is ironic because I repeatedly draw bunnies everywhere. I don’t see that as a logo, it’s a tag. I was watching a film about David Bowie the other night and I got this from it which is very good advice. HOW TO BE A GREAT ARTIST – Change the diversity of what you do at a mind boggling rate. Be prodigious and act as a lightning rod for your time. Bowie did it, I want to achieve something similar, just by doing a whole bunch of crazy different stuff.

CC: What inspires you to create? Where do your ideas come from?

PE: They kind of bombard me from everywhere.. its that whole ‘being a lightning rod’ idea…There’s a flash and then it’s embedded in my cranium.  It might be a sentence in a book I’m reading. It might be an image on Tumblr. It might be something I misheard but decided the new form of the phrase is interesting. It might be from a dream. It might be something that I saw and then promptly forgot and then later on thought of it as an original idea.

I just did a check through my history to see what I have been looking at in the past week :

• an awesome video by Adam Curtis
• a picture of Danny DeVito on Chat Roulette
• a cool music clip
• some art that looked better unfinished than finished which made me go hmmmm
• the discog for a label i’m working with
• pictures of Brigitte Bardot
• and some more pictures of Scarlett Johansen. In a cat suit.
• artwork by Roman Opalka… He drew numbers all his life that slowly whited out..
• and some more rad shit from my ‘RAD SHIT’ folder

CC: What was it like being raised by a father who is an artist? 

PE: He only took me to the cinema once, to see “LIVE AND LET DIE” which was awesome to watch as a kid, but boy he took me to a lot of art museums and we saw a lot of celtic standing stones all over Europe. It was great being surrounded by Picasso’s and Pop Art when I was growing up. I loved seeing how he never stopped painting EVER. It’s really inspiring… he’s probably painting right now.

CC: What was starting your own gallery like? 

PE: It was totally inspired by Aaron Rose’s Alleged Gallery. That was the blueprint, that and Santa’s Ghetto… Just get a space, paint the walls white and hey presto! You have a gallery. I didn’t even think of keeping it going for more than 2 weeks, but it just seemed like fun. Finding a whole basement that could be used to make art and music was a bonus, and the area is smack bang in the middle of street art central which is pretty cool. I call myself the accidental gallerist though, working out how to actually run it and make it work in the long run was a bit of work, but I just looked at Leo Castelli and what an amazing job he did with Pop Art in the 60′s… he’s a bit of a guru. Read Leo and His Circle. It’s an eye opening book.

CC: Your creativity is pretty multifaceted. Could you talk about the different mediums you use in your artwork? Or about the projects you’ve worked on besides visual arts? 

PE: I like spray paint quite a bit. Right now I’m having a lot of fun doing freehand spray stuff and layering OCD tags on top of each other to make randomness. I also like using Krink which moves so beautifully. Then there’s neon which is bloody beautiful to look at and because it comes from signage it’s a perfect medium for street art, which is street signage. I’ve got a neon in a contemporary auction in Paris which is quite humbling because it’s in there with complete legends like Victor Vasarely and Kenneth Noland. Making a genre jump is pretty exciting. Being stuck in one box is tedious. My baby sits in a little brightly coloured doughnut for about half an hour and then she just gets bored and wants some boob. Street Art is the doughnut, Contemporary art is the boob.

I’m quite into making films, just short shonky stuff, and I’m looking into using 16mm just because it’s beautiful and analog. In the basement we have an amazing music studio. It kicks ass. Here’s the music stuff. I’ve got an album called A NEW DAWN coming out in July and another coming out soon after called THE NATIONAL ARCHIVE. All art movements have a soundtrack and were making ours in-house.

CC: Any upcoming projects we should look forward to?

PE: No. Fear them all. Actually I had a baby called Bunny recently and she is going to be something….

Photos by Tim Hans

Stinkfish and Buytre APC painted the above piece about two years ago in London. Originally, it looked like this. As you can see, it now looks mostly the same, except for the face Stinkfish painted. Was it the buff squad? No, that would be a strange buff. Was it that Stinkfish used a strange paint that faded much quicker than the rest of the piece? No. Did a vigilante come along and paint over the face because they didn’t like it? No. Well, sort of. Depending on your take on things.

Pochoir (aka Paul Stephenson) is behind the removal of Stinkfish’s work. In the gallery, Pochoir removes portions of old paintings that he buys at auction. Interesting stuff, right? Well how about on the street? For this piece, Pochoir painted acid onto the parts of the piece that he wanted to remove, and then used half a dozen different abrasive tools to get the paint off.

I recently met Pochoir and he explained to me how a lot of people look at his removal paintings and in their mind they can project an image of what has been removed back onto the painting. Makes sense. I look at this piece and I can imagine that there was a horse there once and what the horse looked like, even though I’d never actually seen the piece before Pochoir got to it. With the removal of Stinkfish’s portrait, I think the same effect is still possible. I can still imagine some sort of idealized version of Stinkfish’s work even though it’s gone.

So I really don’t know what to think of Pochoir’s work. In the gallery, I find it really interesting. It reactivates “dead” paintings. And street art is ephemeral, but should we embrace the intentional speeding up of that process? Or is that completely the wrong way to look at this since Pochoir’s erasure is also artwork too. I don’t know.

What do you think about Pochoir’s work?

Photos by Pochoir

R.Satz in London

Sorry for all the downtime on Vandalog this week. I dunno what’s up with Vandalog’s web host. If you have suggestions of a good web host that I could move to (even though I just switched to Gandi), let me know. Anyway, here’s what I’ve been reading:

• Wow. Cannon Dill and Brett Flanigan painted some great walls together as they traveled across the USA earlier this year.
• I always love checking in on what Mathieu Tremblin is up to.
• BSA have been keeping tabs on Judith Supine’s recent wheatpastes in NYC.
• Know Hope participated in issue 11 of Dispose, an publication where interesting people are given a disposable camera to take 27 photos in 24 hours.
• Decertor really did a nice job with this mural in Morocco.
• Liu Bolin got himself painted into a piece by Meres and Zeso at 5 Points, the graffiti mecca in NYC that unfortunately may soon be no more.
• Did you catch Austin McManus‘ Partner in Crime photo series in Juxtapoz earlier this year? Now you can get the series in zine form.
• LNY’s solo show at Solo(s) Project house in Newark just ended. But here are some photos.
• Shift//Delete recently projected a video onto the famous Gherkin building in London and turned the building into a giant, masterbating, penis.
• Planning to protest the G8? Peter Kennard has some great posters for you to download and use.
• Blade is in the Netherlands for a series of graffiti jams and a show in Amsterdam.

Photo by RJ Rushmore