Finally made my way down to Black Rat Press today for Matt Small’s show “Youngstarrs”. Really fantastic stuff. Here’s photos of some of my favorite pieces thanks to WallKandy (more from this show on flickr):
I really loved this show, and everybody who can should try to see it. In a few years time, when Matt Small is a huge name in art, you will be kicking yourself if you miss this show. It has a variety of work which showcase Matt’s different styles, but it still feels like one body of work with a unified message.
Arrested Motion has an interview with Swoon about her latest boat project, “The Swimming Cities of Serenissima”, which will launch this May. Swoon and her team will launch their homemade crafts from Slovenia and travel all the way to Venice just in time for The Venice Biennale. With any luck, I’ll be in Venice for their arrival, so I’ll be blogging and twitter that, but in the mean time, Arrested Motion is where it is at. Here’s a short excerpt from their interview with Swoon:
AM: Are there any particular themes or issues that you’re looking to explore with this journey?
Swoon: There are many, but just to pull out a thread, I have always felt that these boats are an expression of joy and wonder, while at the same time being a map of anxiety.
We are making a cabinet of wonders by collecting things we find along the way: seeds, bones, flowers, stories – all manner of things. This impulse is about observing, collecting and sharing beautiful things in the world around us, but there is also an element of the impulse to preserve these things and to pack your whole life onto a couple of hand-made rafts and set sail, which is about the feeling that the way we are living is coming apart at the seams, is destroying the world around us and will not last. These boats are not to be taken as a literal solution, but in the way that art distills a language from our imaginations and creates images that speak to us above and below the level of our spoken language, we are addressing these issues in our form.
Urban Angel/The Art Lounge have their latest show opening this Saturday, and the concept might seem a bit counter intuative to most art gallery visitors and owners. This show, 2000 and Down, only has work for sale at £2000 or less.
Some of my favorite up and coming artists are in this show including Klone and Best Ever. With those two especially, I’ve seen some great street work, but I’ve never seen a canvas in person from either of them, so I’m looking forward to it.
In addition, there will be a few print releases, including Sanguine 1 and Sanguine 2 by Part2ism (from his last show at the gallery). Those will be editions of 15 at £150 each (including the Artillery for Pleasure book).
Barry McGee is perhaps the biggest and best respected street artist to ever come out of California (sorry Shepard Fairey). This last week, he’s been on my radar for a few things.
First of all, I started seeing his name popping up for his part in American Realities, the latest show at New Image Art (he was working under the alias Lydia Fong). Check out some photos of that show below (more at Arrested Motion):
And then there is the group show that McGee is involved in at CircleCulture Gallery in Berlin…
Aaron Rose of Beautiful Losers is curating this show, so it’s sure to be something very cool. Images when I get some.
Here’s the PR:
Barry McGee, Ed Templeton and Raymond Pettibon are pioneers and icons of the contemporary urban art movement. Their work can be found in the collections of major museums and has been shown at large exhibitions and biennales worldwide, but all three have repeatedly emphasised their roots in youth subculture – in the worlds of skateboarding, graffiti, punk and hip-hop.
These three sought-after artists are brought together by curator Aaron Rose, whose urban art documentary Beautiful Losers is currently touring the world, in the intimate atmosphere of Berlins Circleculture Gallery.
My French is pretty terrible (just got back from France, realized I couldn’t say much more than ‘merci’ after 9 months not taking the language at school), but what this video is still pretty cool, and I Love Graffiti was able to help sort out with the details about Le Tag.
Le Tag is an exhibit in Paris of graffti by 150 writers. It is currated by French architect Alain-Dominique Gallizia.
Artists in the exhibit include (and I can’t believe this first one) Taki 183, Seen, Doze Green, Phase2, and L’Atlas.
I know that in some ways Taki 183 is just one guy that the New York Times picked up on as an early tagger, but the article featuring him inspired so many people to start tagging, and he was one of the first to really get their name throughout New York City. I didn’t even realize he was still writing his name. The last I’d seen of Taki 183 was in Bomb It the movie, and he didn’t seem too interested in graffiti. Even though it’s “just a tag” and I really like Seen and some of the other artists in this show, Taki 183’s stuff is my personal highlight of Le Tag.
KRINK, probably best known for their markers designed for tagging, have a new product which may hit the market soon: Fire extinguishers. Writers like Katsu have used fire extinguishers to write huge, and soon any writer or random kid with some money to spare will be able to do the same.
Next week at Stella Dore is the opening of Kid Acne’s first London solo show. I’m a big fan of Kid Acne’s work, so I’ll definitely be there.
From Stella Dore:
Part exhibition, part installation, the show will be a concoction of iconography and imagery inspired by Freemasonry, Demonology and Paganism. ‘Smoke and Mirrors‘ opens on 2nd April.
This video is almost a year old, but it’s really street art at its best. Blu had to paint all of this frame by frame. I can even begin to image how much work that took.
A pretty large and cool Banksy original has just been put up on eBay. The piece entitled “Pants” is part of a charity project to raise awareness for the needs of asylum seekers currently living on the streets of London. It’s a really worthy cause, so Banksy has made this semi-new image based on his “Tesco Flag” stencil. So, if you’ve got £30,000 to spare (the opening bid), looks like this might be the place to do it.
