Graffoto Round Up of the Year - Part 2

Part 2 of 4 in the round up of my favourite graffiti and street art action in 2011. Already a few days into the new year, this all feels so last year already. . .

All photos by HowAboutNo except where stated.

Probs

Various

Blam repainted his famous Oscar the Grouch piece (and possibly one of the longest lasting pieceof street art, it was up for nigh on 6 years, but was unfortunately buffed quite a while ago now) I think we all knew this one would never last as long. Painted on a legal spot in Brick Lane that had a lot of visitors this year.

Pablo Delgado proved to be an interesting newcomer, a slightly new take on stuff that could have just been tired and forgotten about, he made sure that he placed them in enough spots to be seen and at least he was an artist that was getting up regardless of any print release of self marketing campaign. (his work is available at Pure Evil I realise, but small hand limited editions only.)

Stik

A.ce

A wet weekend at home in East Sussex in May. Being at home means usually not much to be seen in the way of street art or graffiti - so I took up "urbexing" to fill in some down time. I thought nothing of seeing the odd bit of graff here and there in the derelict buildings....but was amazed to find my first real Paul Insect piece in an old abandoned girls school. . . . .

Myne

Back in January, a chance encounter with a young man on the streets was our first introduction to the colourful and angular world of ALO. Before too long ALO was getting up with spiky, twisted characters on board

Photo: NolionsInEngland

Raise a glass to Bortusk Leer who did more than his share to brighten London's corners with mad-cap fun.

Photo: NolionsInEngland

In April we got our first introduction to a man who came to pretty much own Shoreditch shutters before the year was out. Malarky continued to have a big impact throughout 2011 with High Roller Society hosting a Malarky presented Gocco Printing workshop workshop and a prestigious interview in VNA issue 17, still available here

Photo: NolionsInEngland

We lost two HOFs during the year, the second comes up later but regardless of the arts council lumberjack fest, nothing in the UK matched the cultural desecration the demolition of The Pit, RIP, wrought on an un-broken line back to the very beginnings of London graff.

Photo: NolionsInEngland

One of 2011's most brilliant street art campaigns was by the old master Ron English. Judging by the huge numbers of human-free photos that surfaced on the net it seems not many spotted that the speech bubbles were meant to interact with passers-by, as revealed on Graffoto here.

Photo: NolionsInEngland

Ad Skewville was over in the Spring. Apart the brilliant "Slow Your Roll" show at High Roller Society, Skewville dropped a number of stunning shutters on Roman Rd and Bethnal Green Rd including the pair above exchanging honest Brooklynite greetings across the street.


Photo: NolionsInEngland

Part 3 to follow soon which will cover the months of July to September.

Bortusk Leer/Five Four (joint show): Cheer Up You Rotters

Brick Lane Gallery, London
5 – 16 Feb 2009

photos: NoLionsInEngland except donnierobot and Prescription Art where stated

Some Street artists wouldn’t be seen dead at their gallery openings. Some artists grudgingly turn up, mix with their mum and their crew and mumble “cheers my dears, been doin’ it for years”. Some front up with a natural effervescence that just explodes in everything they touch. And they would be jealous of Bortusk Leer’s off-the-scale panache.

Bortusk Leer’s fluorescent naïve-cartoonish monsters are now a familiar part of the urban decor through-out London’s East End but the street paste-ups are no preparation for the explosion of colour and nursery wackiness that characterises his second joint show, this time with mots-deux specialist Five-Four.




Just to recap, Bortusk Leer started under the Thinkfly pseudonym pasting colourful pigeons on newspaper, morphed into Bortusk with those un-mistakable childish monsters, surprised us with his Supine/Chapman-esque (Jake and Dino, not Mark) defaced vintage prints at his spring 2008 Viola Gallery (dec’d) joint show with Eefos (later to morph into Shuby) then branched his characters out into zany TV quality reality-cartoon montage video shorts and most recently provided regressive urban art affecionadoes with a darts-at-balloons lottery at London’s 2008 Urban Art Awards.

Brick Lane Gallery has been given a nursery make-over to host a primary colour fantasy crèche appropriate to the work of Bortusk Leer.




Photographs from the opening night are worth hunting out, showing Bortusk Leer as his larger then life self providing the kind of entertainment west London parents pay a small fortune to provide birthday parties for their kindergarden kiddies.


photo: Donnierobot


The presence of a wendy house – hang on, isn’t that soooooooooo December 2008? – provides a dayglo habitat for several nightmarish stuffed puppets and assorted characters.


Bortusk Leer/Tony Tagliamenti


Large canvasses provide a cluttered montage of childhood memorabilia with tightly packed toy plastic toys, imitation pistols and even a number of the defaced pictures complete with frames as seen at the Viola show. Incorporating textured letters, splatters and drips of paint, fragments of tagged wallpaper, sprayed monsters and toy detritus, a Bortusk Leer canvass has everything and the kitchen sink thrown in, though an hour rooting around under a nursery bed might deliver a similar effect.


Bortusk Leer: Cheer Up


The wild collision of colours and textures deliver a kaleidoscopic vision of a world seen through acid-fried juvenile eyes.


Bortusk Leer: Toy Story (detail)


A shelf of small sculptures resemble an identity parade line-up from a Frankenstein nightmare, showing a scary disregard for conventions of limb functionality, symmetry or compatibility.


Bortusk Leer: The Usual Suspects


The highlight of the show is what can only be described as a Bortusk Leer performance. Aided and abetted by the Muck Cake Sellers distributing grotesquely coloured Styrofoam muffins to the crowds, Leer gleefully beams across the room like the sun has come to a wintery Brick Lane. Infectious happiness and enthusiasm is irresistible, well certainly after a few opening night refreshments it is.


photo: Prescription Art


In case you wonder what a Muck Cake is, check the hair bobbles here.


photo: Prescription Art


Five Four makes an equally colourful contribution to the show, his oil painted mots-deux on paper collage, squeezed straight out of the tube and left for months to dry on the canvas result in a tubular multi-coloured micro-pollackesque text form. Previously these canvasses used to be left around the streets of London, it was always Five Four’s intention that they should be relocated a happy home.


Five Four


Words pairs are random but the pairings, apart from two exceptions they are pairs, manage to be paradoxical or just plain bizarre. The art though is really in the sumptuous bleeding of colours betwixt the layers of oil. The psychedilia in the colours complements the insane fruitiness of Bortusk.


Five Four


Experiments with lightboxes to enhance the lushness of the colours aren’t entirely successful, areas of white colour look as if a deeper colour has flaked off whilst darker areas don’t allow sufficient illumination to bring out the richness of the colours.


Five Four


You can’t make brilliant art out of shit ideas but strong concepts can build
noteworthy art with even the most rudimentary execution, critics of the child-like stylism in Leer’s work should go to this show to sample the elevating effect the work possesses.

More really great pictures can be seen on the photostreams of Prescription Art and donnierobot.
For more pictures of the art and artifacts, check Bortusk Leer and Five Four

The Eefos of Bortusk

Viola Gallery 1a Turville St 21 Feb 2008

First, a short summary of recent street art history as background to tonight’s show. Several months ago a flutter occurred literally on the streets of London when a flock of pigeons appeared on the walls of Hoxton and Shoreditch. Thinkfly took the whole fluorescent pigeon with eyes and teeth genre to its limits and he and his flock disappeared almost as fast as they came.

Thinkfly

At Christmas, grotesque dayglo monsters from the feverish imagination and possibly hand of a child sprayed directly onto newsprint started appearing daily on walls and hoardings across E1, proudly signed by the artist Bortusk Leer. Anagrams ahoy! Many mainly meaningless permutations of the letters were tested but once the word Luke sprang out of the mess, a surname soon followed and the culprit was swiftly located somewhere around and occasionally in The Leonard Street Gallery. Before this riddle was solved however, a completely anonymous pasted up rosette of Santa’s elves appeared in one location in Blackaller Street exactly at Christmas, followed by further lone Santa’s babes in isolated locations across over to Brick Lane.

Eefos

Nothing to connect the two phenomenon was obvious. Within the last month however, variations on the glamour babes started to appear at the same locations and same times as the rash of paper monsters. Pinning Bortusk Leer to a wall the truth was extracted, a friend of his who was responsible and was going under a nom-de-rue which was her real name backwards. This revelation required the re-captioning of many pictures posted on flickr. Tonight, uniquely, for the first time ever, the same pictures are being re-captioned for the second time following the discovery that the artist can’t spell Sophie.

Bortusk Leer and Eefos

Lest there be any confusion, tonight’s opening is the joint show of the two artists Bortusk Leer and Eefos whose street biography is crudely mis-represented above and whose name lends itself to the pun in the show’s title. Thinkfly got fed up of being pigeon-holed and morphed into the Bortusk Leer under consideration.

The cosy confines of a small room just off Redchurch street – opposite that Banksy tag in the meter box for those who know it or have a copy of BLT – plays host to a large number of compactly hung modified pictures by Bortusk Leer and a smaller collection of Eefos glamour girls in rosettes and panoramas in a variety of uniforms.

The largest paintings which have been subjected to the Bortusk Leer treatment recall a Crude Oils-esque (Banksy in case ya don’t know) alteration, though my favourite is the somewhat smaller corruption of a group of French soldiers from Napoleaonic times which bring to mind the Chapman Brothers defacing (dontcha love mischievously putting those words together) Goya. Given the scale of the pictures, and some are barely 2 inches by 2 inches, this is paste up vandalism on a truely micro scale.

Bortusk Leer

On the streets all Thinkfly’s pigeons had human parts superimposed but Bortusk Leer has flipped the concept in many cases here with humans having animal parts added. Wisely and thankfully, Bortusk keeps the more eroticised images off the streets, looking at the rather gynaecological positioning of a cat’s face between a woman’s thighs doesn’t bring the word “subtle” to mind.

Bortusk Leer

Judith Supine comparisons seem inevitable but this would miss the humour underpinning Bortusk Leer’s work. A smile is what Leer seeks and fun is writ right through his pictures. His rapid rise from a few pigeons on the roadside to a fully fledged show opening in a gallery is infused with an “I can do that” punk spirit.

Good news for fans of the lurid monsters is Bortusk plans to introduce a few of these at the weekend into the gallery. At the rate he manages to whack these up on the street it should be possibly to get several hundred uniques knocked out by Friday.

Turning to his friend, first of all lets get the obvious Hello question out of the way once and for all, Bortusk Leer and Eefos may turn to eachother for friendship and perhaps a look-out when being naughty against a wall, but friendship and an accomplice for art devilment is all it is!

Eefos in contrast to Bortusk Leer has essentially taken her street motif directly into the frame with little modification, which is perfect for the street art purists among us. Using a simple vintage glamour girl image, clad in various coy conservatively revealing outfits and replicated her in multiple rows and rosettes, Eefos’ pictures remind one of a vintage piece of Busby Berkely choreography.

Eefos

As the girls reach out to each other and brush each other’s thighs there is a nuance of lesbian eroticism, though that could just be my mind. Most of the work presented is available in modest editions of 5. The same cute sweetness of the street paste ups is captured in an un-demanding way on the gallery walls.

Eefos

Connections matter a lot; Pure Evil, Beejoir and Mau Mau being among the street celebrities spotted tonight. Cojones count too, and having the necessary to decide that they could do it, that they would have fun doing it and that they would take it all the way to a show indicates spirit, though the relative simplicity of what is presented tonight suggests Bonhams won’t be hammering on the door just yet. Get the point, just enjoy!

Viola Gallery – a rather small room!