Brazilian street art is just plain cooler than street art anywhere else in the world. For a bit of evidence, check out this work from Cena7. His paints some beautiful characters, and I can’t imagine him being from anywhere else. It’s exactly the sort of work I would love to be surprised by one day walking around town.
See more after the jump…
Photos from Cena7
Am I the last person in street art to hear about this, or has it just been kept very quiet? This is a last minute post, but this is something I only heard about an hour ago.
Eine is doing a one night show THIS THURSDAY NIGHT at Nelly Duff Gallery. It’s going to be all about that insanely complex new print he attempted. Here’s the PR stuff:
I’m just in the middle of watching this video myself, but I’m liking it. Marc and Sarah Schiller of Wooster Collective did a talk at the Tate Modern (a similar one I think), and I was devastated to miss it, so this video was a very exciting find for me. It’s their recent talk from PSFK:
I’ve got a few bits of Ron English news today.
First of all, his crazy new print. It’s a lenticular silkscreen. I have no idea how this works, but it sounds cool. The image is his Abraham Obama design that he made for the election.
Edition: 7 Unique Colors, 10 Red White and Blue, 30 Silver Text, 157 Gold Text
Unique Colors: $600
Red White and Blue Text: $600
Silver Text: $500
Gold Text: $500
You can buy them from Jetset Graffiiti.
More Ron English news after the jump… Continue reading “Crazy Ron English Print”
Inkfetish has recently made some updates to his website, and as I think Inkfetish tends to do some very interesting and different work that brightens up the London scene, I suggest you check it out. Okay so this is actually like a week old, but it’s new-ish, and Inkfetish still does nice work.
For those who don’t know Inkfetish, here’s a piece he recently did outside of Cargo.
Only about 2% of Vandalog’s readers are in Germany, but those 2% (and I suppose anybody else in the area between now and August) have the chance to see what promises to be one of the year’s best street art exhibits.
From May 16 to August 30th, the Reinking Collection is showing part of their street art collection at The Weserburg, a modern art museum in Bremen, Germany. Artists in the show include Banksy, Os Gêmeos, Zezão, and Shepard Fairey. Rik Reinking has one of the world’s best collections of street art, so I’m really excited to see a museum doing something so large scale with it.
The press for this exhibition is actually really interesting and worth reading even if you can’t make it down:
Urban Art is everywhere. Unsolicited, it leaves its traces and signs in urban space. It conquers public space with stickers, posters, extensive murals, and stencil graffiti. It’s galleries are the world’s streets. What began as graffiti in the large cities on America’s east coast forty years ago has since experienced a decisive development. Even if the majority of actions continue to be produced anonymously and illegally, it is no longer exclusively a phenomenon associated with youth culture. Many of the protagonists have emancipated themselves from the pictorial language of graffiti writing and experimented with new forms of expression. With their subtle and humorous, occasionally offensive interventions in the urban landscape they attempt to force open familiar visual habits. As a rule, they are not concerned with damaging the urban infrastructure but with participating in a dialogue with the public.
There is a variety of Urban Art. Temporary actions, unusual objects and sculptures, lettering, and characters are woven into the visual flow of the city as stumbling blocks. The possibility that many of the passers-by take no notice of these interventions is consciously taken into account. Thus they comprise a subversive counterweight to the constant presence of advertising, whose blinking images and seductive buying options dominate everyday life. It is not only in this respect that Urban Art is the expression of a critical examination of the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the city, which in the age of globalization is rapidly and sustainably changing.Urban Art has recently experienced a downright hype. Numerous galleries and museums around the world have organized exhibitions, and works by the most well-known representatives of the genre have gained premium prices at auctions. What some accuse of being commercialization, the loss of authenticity, and the betrayal of original interests is viewed by many artists as a new chance. By transferring their themes and methods in the protected space of the museum, they develop very new and surprising approaches. But what kind of art is this that leaves its ancestral terrain? Do the works not require the city as a resonating space, as an immediate opponent? And is one of the essential features of Urban Art not its impermanence, its spontaneity? The Weserburg will be devoting itself to these questions in a large-scale exhibition centered around works from the Reinking Collection.
Via SlamxHype
Update (May 2011): I’m back in London for a few months and running tours. Just email me to set up one (rj at vandalog dot com).
Big announcement today. I’m going to start running street art tours in London. I’ve done a couple of private ones for family friends and my school, but I’d really like to open these up to more people.
The tours will cover street art and graffiti in East London, and we’ll probably visit a gallery as well. We’ll see work from artists like Banksy, Space Invader, Eine, Conor Harrington, Barry McGee, Sickboy, and many more. The tours should last a couple of hours.
The first tour will be on Saturday May 23rd. We’ll be meeting outside of the Old Street tube station at 11am, and end at the Liverpool Street tube station. The cost will be £10 per person and it will be capped to just 15 people. If you are interested in attending, please email rj(at)vandalog.com with your name and how many people are in your party.
This article from the Mail on Sunday is hilarious. It seems that a film-maker tricked Joan Collins into hosting a dinner party for an actor claiming to be Banksy, and she fell for it. Here’s a snippet of the article:
To Joan Collins it must have seemed an unexpected honour too good to refuse – the chance to meet the world-famous, and notoriously secretive, graffiti artist Banksy.
Not surprisingly, she readily accepted the invitation to host a dinner party for the mysterious artist in a grand country home, with other excited celebrities in attendance to share the unique experience.
But The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the entire story was an elaborate hoax, designed to dupe the Dynasty actress – and the rest of the world.
In reality, the ‘Banksy’ who Miss Collins spent five hours entertaining was actor Bryan Lawrence – whose career includes bit parts in The Bill and adverts for the Corby Trouser Press – not the controversial guerrilla artist famed for his stencilled, anarchist graffiti works that can sell for up to £250,000.
When we told Miss Collins of the scam, she admitted she had been completely taken in.
Asked if she knew that the person she believed to be Banksy was, in fact, an actor, she said: ‘I didn’t. I thought it was [Banksy]. I certainly thought it was. Am I surprised? Well, I still think it might be him.’
The bizarre plot was dreamt up by former Tory adviser Ivan Massow, a colourful character who made and lost a fortune selling insurance to gay men, and a familiar face on the London social scene, who has known Miss Collins for 20 years.
He filmed the charade in the hope of hoodwinking a TV broadcaster into buying the footage, promoting it as the first time Banksy had revealed himself on camera.
All I can say is that I would really like to see this footage.
I know I already mentioned Sam3 this week, but these new paintings are the kind of disruptive realism I love.
Post pretty much stolen from one of my favorite street art photoblogs, Unurth
Recently the Pest Control website (the official organization for authenticating Banksy’s work) was updated and the below message was put on their “What is Pest Control?” page. Note the “sales” section:
So that’s new. Pest Control is now the only organization selling original Banksy work on the primary market. I guess Banksy has finally left Lazarides behind (and possibly POW as well, but that makes no sense). Rumors have been swirling for the longest time that Banksy would be leaving Lazarides, but they usually involved Banksy being picked up by larger contemporary galleries like Gagosian or Opera.
This show goes to show how powerful an individual can be in today’s society even without a large organization to back them up. We’ve seen this sort of self-management in music, with Nine Inch Nails ditching their record label and doing fine, and we’ve already seen it in art with Damien Hirst’s auction. Now Banksy’s giving it a try as well.
