I know where I’ll be this Thursday night. The London opening of choice has to be Alex Young‘s solo show with London Miles Gallery. The show’s opening will be on April first at a pop up venue (47 Mowlem Street) in East London, but will move and reopen at London Miles Gallery on April 5th. Also, the opening lasts until 10pm, so that’s a nice touch.
Via Hookedblog
Somehow, I’ve neglected to ever mention Bue on here before. He’s a street artist who works a lot in Belgium and paints some fun characters. Here are two of his paintings:
Photos by oemebamo
There are two cool things about Os Gêmeos to share today.
For the hard-core fans of the twins, 12oz Prophet has this video of Os Gêmeos, Raven and Sonik from back in 1997. You’ve got to love the commitment of risking a car crash just to put up a sticker properly. You can read more on the story behind this clip at 12oz Prophet.
12ozProphet Presents… Found Footage: 1997 Brazil Graffiti with Os Gemeos, Raven & Sonik from 12ozprophet on Vimeo.
And for some reason, the Wall Street Journal seems to be really interested street art this month. A few weeks ago, they printed a story about the Banksy and Robbo issue, and this week they have something about Os Gemêos.
From the WSJ:
The 100-foot-tall man painted on the side of a building here in the old downtown looks vaguely familiar, with features reminiscent of the migrants who flock to this city from Brazil’s vast hinterlands.
But his bright yellow skin and matchstick limbs, clothed in threadbare trousers and a psychedelic shirt, stamp him instantly as something else: a character from the dreamlike world of local street artists Otávio and Gustavo Pandolfo.
The 35-year-old identical twins, who call themselves Os Gêmeos (twins, in Portuguese), started out two decades ago as graffiti artists in Cambuci, the poor, working-class neighborhood where they grew up and still work. Today they are the toast of the international street-art scene, with murals on walls and exhibitions in galleries in cities across the world.
“The success is very gratifying, but we do this primarily for ourselves,” says Gustavo in the brothers’ cluttered office overlooking their studio.
Read the rest of the article at the WSJ online, and send a link to all your friends because it just might turn them into Os Gêmeos fans.
D*face, London’s king of stickering and billboard taker-overs, has designed the album cover for Christina Aguilera’s upcoming album, Bionic. Not that I’m about to go and buy the album, but the cover certainly looks great. D*face is a great designer, which I believe was his job before he went into art.
How did this happen? Aguilera has been a collector of D*face’s artwork for years.
Via Hooked
Most of the time, despite all the politics and whatnot, people in the street art world seem to get along. But there have been two incidences in London recently that have shocked me a bit.
First is what is currently happened to Jon Hammer (aka Elate). Jon believes that for a past few months he has been stalked and intimidated by people who presumably don’t like him and his artwork for whatever reason. This has even gone so far as somebody putting a virus on Jon’s computer and attempting to break into his home. The full story can be found on his blog.
And at the Pure Evil Gallery, two artworks were bought using stolen credit cards. One was by Herakut and the other by Pure Evil. Images of the artwork and more information can be found at Crack For Your Eyes.
I don’t know much about this JaffaCakesTLV show, but Know Hope is involved, so I’ll be checking it out.
Here’s the press release:
Very little of the groundbreaking art created in Israel in the last decade responded directly to [the political unrest], either because artists felt powerless to change a harsh reality, or because they chose to adopt a universalist stance in an attempt to rise above the purely local.” (Amitai Mendelsohn, Real Time: Art in Israel: 1998-2008, 2008).
The first ever exhibition in the UK devoted to contemporary art from Tel Aviv will open on April 16 as a pop-up exhibition in Kenny Schachter’s Rove Gallery. 33-34 Hoxton Square. Examining one of the most interesting, yet unexplored, groups of practicing artists today, JaffaCakes TLV will showcase works by seven artists who are inspired by the diversity and vibrancy of modern-day Tel Aviv. Although artists from Tel Aviv have started to gain attention in the United States and Europe, they have not been shown as a group in the UK until now.
Entitling the show after the well-loved biscuits is a play on words. Its familiarity provides the perfect combination of mundane and mischievous, yet it references a geographical location. Jaffa, one of the oldest ports in the world has become the centre of Israel’s fringe culture; it is youthful, daring and avant-garde. Like Tel Aviv-Jaffa, a city of contradictions, the works in JaffaCakes TLV are beguiling; a multitude of layers slowly reveals an underlying sense of mystery and fantasy.
The exhibition is inspired by renowned short story writer and Camera D’Or winner Etgar Keret. His stories “fuse the banal with the surreal, shot through with a dark, tragicomic sensibility and casual, comic-strip violence.” (The Observer, 13 February 2005). Within the recognisable streets and neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, Keret depicts conventional modern life with injections of irregularity that lead its viewers to question their preconceived notions of reality.The catalogue will feature a short story by Etgar Keret while the artists on show explore and reflect this notion of the uncanny in their work.
For more information, images and artists CVs please email info@jaffacakesTLV.com.
Chris Stain has sent me some images of new rubylith prints that he made recently. They’re nice looking landscapes and extremely affordable at just $30 each. They are for sale at Chris Stain’s online shop.
Lydia Fong (aka Barry McGee) and HuskMitNavn’s two-man show, The Last Night, opened a few days ago at Alice Gallery in Brussels. Here’s some photos of Lydia Fong’s work. As usual, it’s a mixture of new styles and things that McGee has been using for years and years.
Photos are from Glltn, which has plenty more photos of the entire show.
Matt Small and Henrijs Preiss have a two-man show this April at Die Gallerie in Korea. I don’t know much about it, but here’s one of Matt’s new paintings:
