SpY is an urban interventionist working in Madrid. His artistic practices range from interventions to objects, films, and urban furniture. His works include placing brown bags, black hats, and buckets over public statues across the city. SpY fabricates quizzical objects such as a lamp made out of an orange cone and a Rubik's cube with all white squares subtitled For the Lazy Person. Red Nose captures him placing a red nose on a billboard and a different clip, seen above, features him rolling thick black streaks of paint over another large street sign. Each takes place in midday and is accompanied by a jazzy upbeat background score, characteristic of the artist's playful and pleasing reappropriation of the city's fundamental iconography. SpY has been known to place urban furniture throughout Madrid such as his Yellow Fence. He has also positioned over-sized pencils along the M-30, a Madrid peripheral ring road, in Paint Your City. SpY replicates and alters this street imagery and installs his new creation, always in a non-invasive and amusing manner. SpY's first actions began appearing in the mid 1980s. He began as a graffiti artist and later experimented with other forms of artistic production in the street, creating large posters and modifying billboards. His pieces are based on years of urban observation and exist to break the mechanized motions of the modern urban dweller. The contexts for the works are always carefully chosen, and his works themselves always spontaneous and ironic, opening artistic communication in the street for anyone who wants to join. SpY has been reviewed by Serie B magazine and an interview with SpY by Subaquatica can be found online. | |||||
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And Larry makes three. Over the last month London has had the privilege of hosting new work from three of the father figures of contemporary art. Besides Ed Ruscha and Larry Clark, there was also Lawrence Weiner. Weiner's exhibition took place at Lisson Gallery, and just ended last week. These guys have inspired generations of younger artists, by continually producing challenging new work over a 30 year career. Weiner's exhibition came on the heels of his first American retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This time Weiner focuses on emphasizing his command of the formal concerns of artistic presentation. Visually stunning in the use of vibrant hues, this exhibition also sharpens the sociological implications that have always been present in Weiner's work. "FIRST MOVE, SECOND MOVE, THIRD MOVE", suggests that the first move should be to circle the wagons, establishing a protected personal space. Only then, will we be prepared to go out and deal with societal structures. "OFFSIDES", uses two vertical lines as a formal devise to bracket the text, while not confining it. Thought of in a social context, it establishes opposition. It can refer to expanding to new territories or taken negatively, being on the wrong side. "FOUND BY CHANCE AFTER ANY GIVEN TIME FOUND ALONE AFTER ANY GIVEN TIME" The operative words here are, "Found" and "Alone". Found refers to others, while alone stresses the individual. This highlighting of the personal should not be taken in the, "Me Generation", sense of the word. Larry's too much of an old hippie for that. Rather, he's asking us to consider how our personal choices affect society. Weiner began his career with the pioneering conceptual art dealer, Seth Siegelaub, later he worked for years with Leo Castelli. Currently he works in whatever contexts he finds interesting, while remaining fiercely loyal to those he respects. Demonstrating continuing curiosity, Weiner also has a super cool website, "HOMEPORT", and all this at 66. Lawerence Weiner, "OFFSIDES" Lisson Gallery, February 6, - March 15. | |||||
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Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer and Louise Lawler have joined forces in a viral public art project. Since early February, the artists have been disseminating art work throughout Los Angeles - Kruger and Sherman via billboards, Holzer via posters, zip screens and stickers, and Lawler via sound and broadcasts. The above video shows Holzer's zip screen "Truisms" as it loops at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue. The multi-location, multi-media exhibition, titled "Women in the City," was arranged to coincide with the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and is being sponsored by the Broad Art Foundation, the Pasadena Arts Council, and the Francois Pinault Foundation. Work by Holzer, Kruger, and Sherman is currently on display at the Broad Contemporary, and all four contributing artists have been influential art world figures since the 1980s. Emi Fontana, who curated "Women in the City," is the organizer of West of Rome, a project that supports art work that engages the city and the public. "Women in the City" re-envisions the ways in which Kruger, Sherman, Holzer and Lawler engaged social and political spaces in their work, literally putting their work into prominent urban locations. | |||||
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The Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway is currently exhibiting Jan Christensen's "All Those Moments Will Be Lost" until March 9th. Christensen has explored different aspects of contemporary art and its markets in his previous works. His 2007 piece, Relative Value, which consisted of 100,000 krone (roughly $16,000) affixed to a 4 x 2 meter canvas, was stolen from it's exhibition, generating international media attention for Christensen. Christensen's aggressive attitude in his art comes from his background in graffiti, and can be seen in large-scale works such as his series, Painting Myself into a Corner, in which the artist uses thick painterly gestures to saturate a corner of the gallery in solid color. Christensen is restlessly creative, not content to be confined to a single medium. He segues between two and three-dimensional works, incorporating abstract images, video stills, text, and graffiti-based works. Christensen has previously exhibited across Europe and in the United States, both at the Galleri MGM in Oslo and at the Buia Gallery in New York. For the Stenersen exhibition, Christensen ventures into the realm of light and sound, orchestrating an eclectic experience for the viewer by incorporating designs of the past and music of today. He has displayed over 80 lamps, dating from the Bauhaus period to the present, which he collected around Germany, where he currently lives and works. The artist has appropriated these "established design classics" and accompanied them with a contemporary soundtrack composed and produced by Rolf-Yngve Uggen and Johnny Skalleberg. The installation consists of the colorful lamps hung at various heights from 15 platforms suspended below the ceiling. The emanative qualities of the music and the luminosity of the lamps envelop the viewer and take the sensory experience a step beyond his previous, more visually exciting works. | |||||
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 Italian artist Blu has developed an international reputation for his signature public wall paintings. His work stems from a strong interest in drawing, which has been influenced by graffiti and street art. Recently, Blu has created a series of wall drawing/animations through stop motion photography that allow his characters to come to life and interact with themselves. Just a few months ago the artist traveled to Bethlehem with fellow artists including Banksy, Sam3, and Paul Insect to work on an the exhibition titled "Santa's Ghetto." For the show, the artists rented an old fast-food restaurant and presented and sold a mix of western and Palestinian artist's works to raise more than a million dollars for local charities. Blu has painted walls in almost every continent in the world and is currently represented by the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in the U.S. and Lazarides Gallery in London. Swindle Magazine featured the artist in their final issue of 2007. | |||||
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 The anonymous street art / urban interventionist collective CutUp is based in East London, but have been subverting advertising on the streets of cities world wide. The main focus of the group is to disrupt the everyday experience of passerbys and to promote discussion through altering preexisting urban structures, namely billboards. They have been achieving this by ripping down existing advertising and "cutting-up" the images to make new collaged images that are reapplied to different advertisements. In addition to their street-based projects, the group has also exhibited internationally with shows such as "Play: Experience the Adventure of Our Cities" at the Urbis Centre for Urban Art in Manchester UK, "Satellites: an i-cabin project" at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and "La Vida Te Espera", NIU, Barcelona. | |||||
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 Curated by Thibault Sandret of Glam Trash Pop and hosted by Virginie Sommet's Studio/Gallery 173 on Canel Street is the exhibition "Don't Call It Street Art," which will be on open to the public beginning this weekend on Dec 15th. The group show celebrates Street Art through photography, painting, collage, graphic design and live body painting. By taking the art out of its urban context and hanging in a gallery the work becomes legalized as well as institutionalized. Sandret hopes that by placing the work in the space of the gallery, people will allow themselves to slow down and take a look in a way that may otherwise not happen when quickly passed on the streets. Artists included in the show include Ogi, COL & Veng, Nathalie Hamelin, Iris Arnaud, Gary St Clare, Hugo Martin, Jake Dobkin and Alexandra Zsigmond. | |||||
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 Chicago-based artist J.A. Zimmermann creates massive outdoor paintings which reflect the communities and the built environment around the painting site. Zimmermann actively meets members of the Chicago community and represents them with an elevated and monumental stature. The artist has also become known for his small works which often depict vehicles such as ice cream trucks and police paddy wagons, as well as paintings of trash clumps which he has coined "urban tumble weeds." Zimmerman received his BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has completed numerous exhibitions and large-scale public paintings in the US, Puerto Rico, Kenya and Peru. In the summer of 2003, the artist presented "Dark Matter" an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, and 2006 he completed their artist in residency program with a 38' x 15' painting titled "Thinking Out Load." | |||||
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 The culturally infused sculptures and paintings of artist BAST are deeply rooted in the elements of hip-hop. The artist explores the energy of graffiti and the surfaces of dilapidated and weathered signage, often depicting devious cartoon characters parading around with guns. Some of the artist's personified characters are exaggerated to humorously reflect the stereotypes associated with hip-hop culture. Bast's work is gritty, ghetto, and fit with a twisted humor. In a recent exhibition with New Image Art Gallery in Hollywood, California the artist presented a collection of "hunting monsters," which mixed Hollywood monster characters like the Wolfman and Creature from the Black Lagoon with modern urban characters like Flava Flav and Biz Markie. | |||||
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 On Sept. 14 Belgian artist/designer Arne Quinze's latest work "Cityscape" will open on the suburban streets of Brussels, Belgium. The enormous wooden sculpture is 131-feet long, 82-feet wide and 39-feet high and will stand for year in Brussels' luxury district. Quinze, the artistic director of design company Quinze and Milan,says of his piece, "'Cityscape' resembles a frozen movement, speed caught in time." The piece encourages interaction, people are able to walk through and experience the changes in light as the sun comes through the wood. The aritst built a similar structure last year at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada. At the end of the festival the structure was set on fire. A self-taught artist, Quinze first found his creative outlet with graffitti as a homeless 15-year-old. Later this month Quinze has several pieces in Mutagenesis, a solo exhibition at the Abitare Il Tempo design exhibition in Verona, Italy. To listen to a discussion with the artist on WPS1 Art Radio click here. | |||||
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 California-based artist, Aaron Noble, creates seemingly abstract compositions from imagery associated with commercial comic books. While the artist's work is deeply rooted in superhero-based images, he manages to extract any form of narrative, leaving the viewer to decode the mass of ambiguous information as a unique form. Noble has new work on view in his first solo show with Pavel Zoubok Gallery in NYC, entitled "Rainbow 6: Warsong." The exhibition, which opens this weekend, offers several newly constructed works that explore the various bosses and enemies that relate to the world of Manga Japanese animation. In addition to painting and drawing, Noble has also developed an extensive list of public wall murals that allow his imagery to unfold on a mass scale. Noble attended the San Francisco Art Institute before co-founding the Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP) in San Francisco in 1991. The artist has completed projects with the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, White Columns in NYC, and PeerUK in London.
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 Artist Mike Giant has reached international acclaim recently for his versatile artistic ability that spans graffiti, design and tattoo. Giant was born in Upstate New York and grew up in New Mexico. After studying architecture, he moved to San Francisco to work for Think Skateboards. In 2002, Giant traveled to Tokyo with fellow artists Sam Flores and Bigfoot to exhibit in a show presented by Fifty24SF and Beams T, and, in 2003, that artist founded the now infamous "Stay Gold" tattoo shop. Giant is currently exhibiting in the Fecal Face 7.5 Year Anniversary Show held at the Minna Gallery in San Francisco. He has upcoming exhibitions with Monster Children Gallery in Sydney, Australia, and White Walls Gallery in San Francisco and the Magda Danysz Gallery in Paris. | |||||
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SABER is one of Los Angeles' leading graffiti writers who had already developed wide notoriety for his omnipresence within the L.A. area when he created in 1997 the world's largest illegal graffiti piece (a title which he still holds). The solo project was created on a sloping cement bank on the Los Angeles River and can be viewed from a satellite photo. The complete work took the artist 97 gallons of paint and 35 nights to create. The artist grew up in the Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles, and was introduced to graffiti at age 13. Later, SABER joined the infamous graffiti crews AWR, MSK and The Seventh Letter and began creating public works both legal and illegal worldwide. SABER's first solo exhibition, "Close Encounters," is opening this weekend at White Walls Gallery in San Francisco along with a book signing for the artist's new 168-page monograph, "Mad Society." The book will be released by Gingko Press and has an in-store release date of Aug. 7. | |||||
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New York City-born artist KR has revolutionized traditional elements of graffiti and street art by placing his primary focus on the process. KR moved from New York City to San Francisco in the '90s to attend the San Francisco Art Institute. With three primary areas of focus -- application, documentation and material -- KR became a dominant influence on the Bay Area graffiti scene. The artist invented and patented his own form of ink called "KRINK," which is now sold internationally and is renowned for its opaque silver color and its ability to drip like no other ink. Recently at Eyebeam, an art and technology center in New York City that promotes digital research and experimentation and contains the Graffiti Research Lab, KR presented "Open City, tools for public action," a painting performance and installation that demonstrated KR's infamous techniques. The artist is affiliated with the Wooster Collective and was featured in the book "The Art of Getting Over" by artist Stephen Powers, also known as ESPO. | |||||
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 Currently on view at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York City is "E Pluribus Venom," a solo exhibition featuring new works by California-based artist Shepard Fairey. Fairey, who is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Art and Design, gained much notoriety even before attending school for his iconic renderings and street campaigns of former wrestler Andre the Giant. The title "E Pluribus Venom" translates as "out of many poisons" and is derived from "e pluribus unum," or "out of many, one," which was used as an early motto by the U.S. government on coins and dollar bills. Fairey's works investigate symbols that are associated with the ideologies of the American Dream. The artist organizes his imagery through a graphic language, employing the ideas of propaganda, advertising and anarchy. Fairey was born in Charleston, S.C., and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Fairey has grown a design empire that reaches into the markets of clothing, skateboards, publications, corporate icons, stickers, stencils and posters. In 2005, the artist co-founded Swindle Magazine, and, in 2006, he released his latest book, "Supply and Demand: The Art of Shepard Fairey," and was a resident artist at the Honolulu Contemporary Art Museum. Fairey's works have been exhibited internationally in numerous museums, including the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art in New Castle, UK, and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. | |||||
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New York City-based artist SWOON creates fantastical cityscapes that are delicately rendered through cut paper and often posted publicly on the streets of New York. In the above video, the artist presents her work as part of this year's "Conversations with Contemporary Artists" series at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. SWOON introduced herself to New York by covering the city's streets with her signature public works, including cut-outs, billboard alterations, poster campaigns and street parties. The artist creates life-sized installations, indoors and outdoors, that depict friends and families engaging in a variety of everyday activities that take place within the city. SWOON gained much notoriety from her outdoor works, especially her street peepholes that, once discovered, allow viewers a glimpse into a secret world. The artist has been traveling for several years, exhibiting works across the United States and Europe. SWOON has collaborated with such groups as the Barnstormers, Glowlab and Change Agent. She has exhibited in the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center's "Greater New York" show in 2005 and has exhibited a massive walk-through installation with the Deitch Projects in New York City. | |||||
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 Brooklyn-based artist David Ellis creates work that is influenced by hip-hop culture and traditional elements of graffiti. The artist moved to New York to work in the music video business. However, he soon ended that career and began to develop Barnstormers, a group of some of the most prominent and well-respected graffiti, street and mural artists working in the U.S. today. Ellis has gained much notoriety for his live motion paintings that are often filmed and created to music. Music is pivotal to the artist's creative process and influences his imagery, sculptures and production. Many of the artist's works are painted directly on the gallery walls or onto buses, vans and cars. Many of his mechanical works are driven by small computers and beat-making devices that are controlled by impressions written onto vinyl records. The computers cause mallets to bang on a variety of items such as oil cans, cymbals and drums. The artist has exhibited throughout the country, including recent shows at the Red Gallery in Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, and at the Jessica Murray Projects in New York City. The artist recently appeared with a full interview in the art and contemporary culture magazine Juxtapoz. | |||||
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 South African-born artist Robin Rhode works in a variety of media, including performance, photography, sculpture and video that centers on his personal experiences as a young man growing up in Johannesburg suburbs. The artist uses and alters everyday objects that reference South African products or that embodies a personal or social connection to the artist. Rhode is currently exhibiting new work in all three of the Perry Rubenstein Gallery's exhibition spaces. The artist has continued his interest in exploring narratives where he uses only the most basic of materials to complete his ideas. Recently, the artist has expanded to 16mm film and sculpture and has created a collaborative performance in Rheims, France, with professional dancer Jean-Baptiste Andre and violinist and cellist Didier Pertit. Rhode lives and works in Berlin and in September will have his first major museum exhibition in Europe at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Rhode has exhibited internationally, including notable shows with Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. | |||||
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 Artist Chris Johanson's brightly colored, socially saturated works offer a humorous light to current cultural and societal feelings. With the background of the artist rooted in contemporary culture rather than formal art training, Johanson is able to rely solely on his personal experiences and the collective experience of all Americans to explore absurdity and humor in contemporary life. The artist is a prolific creator and clearly prefers a steady stream of ideas to be completed over tedious long-term works. Johanson is a Bay Area artist who is often included in the "Mission School," a group of suburban-influenced creators, including Barry Mcgee and Margaret Kilgallen. Johanson was launched into art stardom after receiving the SECA Art Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and being included in 2002 Whitney Biennial. The following year, the artist completed an exhibition with the Deitch Projects in New York City titled "Now is Now" and was included in an exhibition at SITE Santa Fe. This year, the artist will exhibit "Apex: Chris Johanson" at the Portland Art Museum, and, in 2008, Johanson will exhibit again with the Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco. | |||||
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 A new multi-media extravaganza exhibition titled "a very anxious feeling" by assume vivid astro focus (avaf) is on view with John Connelly Presents in New York City. The exhibition contains three environments within the gallery and includes 3-D wallpaper, a corridor of music, flashing neon sculptures, video and a room with a series of music-related performances. A featured installation titled "Four-letter words" is comprised of wrapped objects and text-based wallpaper with provocative words such as BUSH, HOMO, PRAY, ANAL and HOPE. The gallery also converted the store-room basement into an extension of the show that features five abstract neon sculptures. In addition, the exhibition contains a re-installed series of work from a previous exhibition titled "absorb viral attack fantasy" with Hiromi Yoshii in Tokyo. assume vivid astro focus is led by artist Eli Sudbrack and is said to contain many members who are all born anytime between the 20th and 21st centuries in various parts of the world. This year, (avaf) will exhibit assume vivid astro focus XVIII with Deitch Projects as a follow up to the widely popular exhibit in 2003. (avaf) will also be featured this year in "Destroy Athens" at Athens Biennial and "Space for The Future" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. | |||||
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 Opening this month at DreamBagsJaguarShoes (MySpace) in London is an exhibition by the influential Bristol-based artist Mudwig Dans. Dans has developed a reputation as an innovative yet elusive underground artist. Infusing an aesthetic rooted in 20th-century propaganda posters, illustrations and animation, Dans daringly juxtaposes found photographic imagery with experimental computer-based alterations. The subversive images contained in the work reference forms often found in Disney and Dr. Suess animations. The hybrid forms adorn media, ranging from computer animations and billboard subversions to canvases and wall paintings. The artist has previously exhibited "Talking Walls" at Bristol's Arnolfini and has been included in the group show "Hollywood Remix" at the Wooster Collective Arts Space in New York City. Additional images of Dan's work can be found on kuidoosh.com. | |||||
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 Creator of the Space Monkey, artist Dalek has made a name for himself in both the street art and gallery worlds for his unique style and character invention. Little information is given about these graphic creatures that greet us with one eye open and mouths agape. The characters are expressed with black humor, often engaging in mischief, while occupying a flat abstracted ground composed on only one or two colors. Dalek is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Virginia Commonwealth University. The artist has created limited-edition toys for Kid Robot, and, in 2005, he exhibited "The Way That I Want You To Die" with the Jonathan Le Vine Gallery in New York City and "Blood Bath" with Merry Karnowski Gallery in Los Angeles. Dalek has been featured on the popular graffiti Web site Art Crimes and has appeared in numerous magazines, such as Mass Appeal and Juxtapoz. | |||||
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 The artist duo "Os Gemeos" are identical twin brothers from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Os Gemeos gained international notoriety from their ambitious campaign of visual characters in the city of Sao Paulo. Some of these characters are painted six stories high or more. In 1993, while only 19 years old, Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo (Os Gemeos) met with young American graffiti writer Barry McGee. The three artists collaborated on several projects and influenced each other immensely. Os Gemeos is now being featured in art and graffiti magazines worldwide, but the magazine 12oz Profit was the first to expose their work to the United States and abroad. In 2006, the artists exhibited "The fish that ate shooting stars" at Galeria Fortes Vilaca in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The year prior, the Os Gemeos exhibited "Cavaleriro Marginal" with the Deitch Projects in NYC and collaborated with Creative Time to present a mural on Coney Island. | |||||
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 This fall artist Doze Green presented a series of new paintings titled "Left Hand Path" at Jonathan Levine Gallery in NYC. Doze was a pioneer of Hip-hop growing up in Manhattan in the late 70's along side the Rock Steady Crew and fellow artists Lady Pink, Daze, and Mr. Wiggles. He appeared in classic movies such as Style Wars and Wild Style, and has remained an active force in street art through today. Doze Green's current paintings explore physics and metaphysical concepts, often using fragmented elements to referece a non-fixed reality. Doze' work has been featured in magazines such as Tokion, Juxtapoz, and Anthem, and he was also included in the new Upper PlayGround video "The Run Up". | |||||
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