Interesni Kazki are pretty much what people think of when they think of street art in Ukraine, so I’m excited to see that they are bringing some of their work to Gallery All Over in Lyon, France. The duo’s imagery is somewhere between Date Farmers and Os Gêmeos, but still all their own.
For the first time in France, Ukrainian artists AEC and Waone from Interesni Kazki will exhi- bit their last work in the gallery All Over, in Lyon, for a show called “Paranoya & Shtrihi”. Their enchanting world of animated objects, symbols and characters will be displayed with work on canvas, papers, and murals. Opening will be on thursday the 4th of february and the show will runs until the 4th of march 2010.
AEC (Aleksei Bordusov) and Waone (Wladimir Manzhos) are two precursors of graffiti in Eastern Europe. Both grew up in Kiev, Ukraine, where they developped their art among the collective IK they created in 1999. At first, these initials corresponded to Ingenuous Kids, a crew of 11 friends who practiced graffiti. As their art evolved over the years, in 2005 the two friends continued their passion under the name of Interesni Kazki (that we can trans- late as “interesting tale”) in order to slowly break with traditional graffiti codes. They stood out for example, by excluding lettering from their paintings in order to represent fantastic and surrealistic characters. This new art bears a certain relationship to the South American Muralism movement, whose practice consists of painting murals with political content over the walls of cities, especially on public buildings.
They usually work together, which allows them to be better organized, and therefore even more efficient. They also use very large areas such as entire building facades, a dozen of which have already been completed in Kiev, as well as more than 50 other paintings all over Ukraine.
All these paintings share the fantastic sphere proper to Interesni Kazki representing the imagery of fairy tales, magic, space, mysticism, science and religion. This world of living objects, symbols, and magical beings is “an all-embracing image of the universe” which denies the ordinary and senselessness. Through this paradoxical universe the two artists wish to represent reality the way they perceive it and in turn allow the spectator to discover his or her own respective reality.
Here’s some of their artwork:
