From The Brick Lane Gallery:
CHEER UP YOU ROTTERS
5th – 16th February 2009
Private View Thursday 5th February, 6-9pmArtists BORTUSK LEER and FIVE FOUR are united for the first time by Brick Lane Gallery to fill the space with the cheeky day-glo madness of their street-art inspired works and chaotic colourful lifestyles for what promises to be a lively antidote to a particularly monotonous gloomy February.
The fruit of forbidden love between a Lion Tamer and a Candy floss seller BORTUSK LEER was forced to find his own way in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. Though his early years are shrouded in mystery (some say circus some say tractor barn) by his teens, Leer could be found joyfully daubing the walls of his homeland with fantastical-childlike characters, psychedelic
vermin and inhuman collage… Art comedy was born and Leer never looked back, particularly when being chased by the secret police with big-headed pictures of Lenin streaming out behind him …always sporting the trademark Top Hat and Cane he had won wrestling a Turk on the quay of Messina.
More here