Best of London Street Art Part 2 - The Mural Bites Back

London has witnessed in 2013 a pretty significant growth in the number of large scale street art productions created with permission and indeed it seems, a growth in the number of organisations arranging spots for artists. Whilst Graffoto’s natural tendency is to prefer street art created without permission, we don’t judge just because something is painted without the frission of illegality, which is anyway a over-romanticised notion most of the time when what is really meant is “without explicit permission”.

We review the big, the wild, the bright and the spectacular here in part 2 of our review of 2013’s London street art, part 1 looked at the grittier less house trained stuff done without permission and should be read first HERE 

Words: NoLionsInEngland
Photos: NoLionsInEngland except HowAboutNo where stated.

Moniker Art Fair moved location and changed up a gear in October, attracting a large number of street art galleries and street artists. One of the best consequences was the lads from Souled Out Studios, Bon and Alex Face from Thailand and Mau Mau from the West Country painting this fun composition in which they gave Roa’s iconic bird a leg, which they proceed to barbecue.


Bon, Mau Mau, Alex Face. Also feat Roa, Martin Ron


Not far away Alex Face and Bon illustrate themselves literally delivering a splash of colour to London’s walls.


Alex Face, Bon


Dal East played a cunning game with a series of murals, staging a competition based around photographing all his fresh London murals which you could only complete by photographing the final hidden mural revealed at the launch of his London show.


Dal East


At the same time Faith 47 executed her most spectacular work in London to date, though the timing won’t surprise anyone aware that Dal East and Faith47 are a married couple.


Faith47


The most stunning project by a mile was spraycan virtuoso Shok-1’s ten part X-Ray Rainbows paintings which commenced in 2012 and concluded in August 2013. Not all of our photographs in this slide show capture the pieces in their best condition as the artist intended, sorry Shok-1 Sir.


All photos: NoLionsInEngland


Miss Van’s last outdoor wall decoration in London was an illegal piece out in Ladbroke Grove, West London which survived until about 2007 so it was nice that she painted this stunning piece in Shoreditch in collaboration with Italian sculptor Ciro Schu.


Miss Van, Ciro Schu (with Pure Evil mugging in the shot


Cranio visited from Brazil for the second time in just under 12 months and did a mixture of stunning illegal, permissioned and gallery work all based around the theme of the Amazon Indians indulging themselves with the gains from selling off their rainforest.


Cranio

The permissioned Cranio collaboration with HIN photographed below caused a little upset and mural organiser censorship, not because of the nudity or the suicide bomber or the obscene gestures but seemingly due to the pasted face portraits of evil dictators.


Cranio, HIN, feat Alex Senna


Roa worked his large scale magic in a couple of London spots, most visibly on the Southbank but to more gory effect in an alley on the way to Hackney.


ROA


Alex Senna seemed to get to paint lots of spots in the Shoreditch area, this one featured a then topical nod to the new born Prince George.


Alex Senna


Award for the least appropriate most thoughtless mural goes to the upside down break dancer painted by Martin Ron next to Roa’s bird on Hanbury Street, you might as well try to fit a Jackson Pollock and a Turner on the same canvas for all the relationship and harmony there is between the two subjects on that wall. After Cosmo Sarsen first in Bristol and Above in Shoreditch before him in 2013, did we really need another upside down breakdancer anyway?


Martin Ron v. Roa, no contest!


During the London Art Fair week RYCA put up a crisp clean Clone troopers paste up collage on the boards erected outside Shoreditch Junk following the McDonalds sponsored buff at that spot.


RYCA


A particularly wild and wet night saw RYCA's paste up virtually jet blasted off the wall producing an effect RYCA liked so much he repaired the damage by recreating it with paste ups and stencils. As a sort of post script note – the weather over the Christmas break has added real damage to the simulated damage!


RYCA


Zadok has hit a lot of walls, not all of them necessarily with prior consent we suspect but all superbly realised.


Dr Zadok


One of our favourite permissioned pieces in 2013 is the wild abstract assault RSH executed on the Lord Napier premises at Hackney Wick just prior to the Hackney Wicked Festival, a stunning visual attack on premises and eyeballs.


RSH


One of the less fortunate projects realised during the year has been the “rejuvenation” of Hackney’s canal sides. Where once there was un-curated street art and graffiti there is now, in the case of the old sugar factory wall, a huge mural painted by foreign artists (ok..Scottish in one case) and rumour has it then coated with anti graffiti paint, oh the irony. So, that’s the displacement of many local un-curated artists in favour of curated and protected outsiders, not surprising really that feathers have been ruffled in the area. Nevermind, it’ll look nice in the brochure and the Olympic Legacy reports.


Lyken, Moneyless


A local based artist who has been getting good walls this year is Dale Grimshaw who pulled off a couple of stunning gothic horror portraits, which is a good thing of course.


Dale Grimshaw


Dan Kitchener got a lot of spraypaint onto walls this year as well, it’s hard to decide whether to favour the underground tracks paintings or the rainy neon nights studies more, he does them both beautifully.




Dan Kitchener


Jimmy C has a pretty productive year, apparently the first of these images produced a 3D effect when viewed through 3D glasses, which could explain all those weird glasses we see people wearing in the area.





Jimmy C photos by HowAboutNo


Seems you could hardly walk around Shoreditch this year without seeing a new Lost Souls mural, bloody everywhere!


Lost Souls feat Captain Kris, SP047, Si Mitchell, Squirl


As usual, all opinions are those of the authors of Graffoto, happy to share ;-)

Happy New Year to all Graffoto readers and may you have a happy and colourful 2014.

Hit Shot Walls - September 2013

All photos HowAboutNo
Words NoLionsInEngland

We are just over halfway through October so it must be time to reminisce fondly on the street art that appeared on Shoreditch walls back in September. We can also reminisce on the good old days when the part of Graffoto wandering round with a camera would let the part of Graffoto that thumps the keyboard keys know that the pics were ready in the draft box;-)

MJar put up some wonderfully hand coloured and spray finished paste ups then he got round to fighting evil nasties by putting his paste up faces over advertising for a record which was trying to pass itself off as street art.

MJar


Art Is Trash is still around and still looking like the big new thing in street art for 2013. The non conformist anthropomorphised packaging of his installations continue to defy categorisation as domestic refuse (white bin bags) or restuarant waste (black bin bags) and so create a pavement mess for quite a few days! He also takes up cudgels on behalf of the virtuous by assaulting flyposters placed over graffiti, the particular modification below were truly spectacular.

Art Is Trash


Is was nice to see Pablo Delgado back at the bottom of the brick canvas, this particular example of his work being quite epic.

Pablo Delgado


Our favourite Brazilian Cranio rounded off his visit to London with this scorching Mural showing hs friends the rainforest indians enjoying their drugg, pets, iPhones and replica kits in a denuded brown landscape stripped of trees. Sadly the day after he left some toys went to town tagging it.

Cranio


Unknown unknown

We love the cool way Miilo has transformed the Post office logo into a teeshirt design here

Mean strikes a blow for Shoreditch graffing

Mean

Binho brought a delicious characteristic Brazilian style to the streets of Shoreditch

Binho


Saki was pretty busy this month in particular doing some wonderful stuff in the windows and doors of a barred abandoned building but this isn't it.

Saki and Bitches

SP Zero76


It has been quite a while since a street artist provoked such unanimous hostility as 2-Square, perhaps it is the work on the walls, perhaps it is the dippy hippy over the top sheepskin look, I'd like to think it was collective critical horror at their piss poor painting slap next to the Roa Hackney Road rat

2-Square


C3's work has charmed us mainly by dint of appearing in D7606's old phone boxes and vintage TVs so it was nice to find this large size heavy duty one off solo piece of work.

C3


Also making a more than welcome return to Shoreditch's walls was environmentalist Xylo. It has not yet been determined if this tile is referencing the work of sculptor Jacob Epstein or a droid.

Xylo


To finish this look back, this manic cracker on the home turf of HowAboutNo from the cans and brushes of Rowdy and Sweet Toof


Sweet Toof, Rowdy

Cranio at Fun Factory, London

Fun Factory
133 - 135 Bethnal Green Road
29 August, 1 night only

all photographs: NoLionsInEngland


Cranio has been busy in London for the past few weeks painting a load of his characters on very visible walls across the metropolis, and a few low key not so legitimate walls but hush hush about that apparently.


Cranio, Brick Lane, Shoreditch


Cranio, Shoreditch, London


If came as a surprise to hear that he had found enough time during his stay here to dive into the studio and create a dozen stunning large images on paper. They are all formed around the same basic image of one figure stage right but are all so dissimilar as to be effectively each an original. The figure is Cranio’s Amazonian Indian who is up to his usual spendthrift tricks having flogged his land rights and cultural identity for a suitcase full of dollars.




Bus Stop


The gimmicky twist with these pictures becomes apparent when the lights go down and the pictures glow. Well, some of them.




"For sale: one size fits all"


This display brought all twelve prints together for one night only before they got packed up and despatched to their new owners. It appeared on the night that a few may still be available. One more thought, looking at the rough hewn finish of Fun Factory’s temporary home cements Fun Factory's niche in London's street art culture, kind of where Pure Evil was a while back. This manifestation of Fun Factory will be missed when it is obliged to pull down the shutters in early September when the building redevelopment starts.

Cranio - Lost In London

Zero Cool Gallery @ Red Bull Studios, London
Nov 16th – 19th 2012

All photos: NoLionsInEngland


Interesting opening in London this week of Cranio’s show “Lost in London” . Interesting because this guy’s work is beautiful, obviously, but also because the question arises “how come we see so little Brazilian street art talent in the UK?”


Cranio, DScreet (detail)


After loving Cranio’s work by proxy on the net for the past 4 years it was a great thrill when his presence in London was recently revealed by the whiff of spraypaint on Brick Lane.




A few nights later, more Cranio work appeared in Hackney Wick.


Cranio, Sweet Toof


Several other shutters have been painted and most recently, we chanced upon him again decorating the outside of a Brazilian restaurant on Rivington St.




The gallery show is a straight forward hand of some ten or so cartoon portraits, compositions featuring our hero lost among totemic London iconography and some Brazilian surrealism.


2012


Hitting The New Beast


Cranio’s figures are Brazilian rainforest Indians painted wearing their party suits – blue body paint and solid red stripes across their eyes. Solid black across the eyes means war apparently. The two streams of coherence running through this show concern Brazilians on the lash and a Brazilian writer getting up in London.


Portrait I

The paintings are actually a record of Cranio’s despair at the fate of the rainforest Indians who sell up their land for deforestation and with the loot go and party with western hairstyles, western goods but no realisation that the deal bartered away their culture as well as their homelands.


Consumerist Turist


Speaking of Brazilians in London, back to that question, why so few Brazilians in the UK? The Os Gemeos twins did a couple of huge commissions a few years back but I don’t recall any UK solo shows; Titifreak has been over once or twice (2009, O Contemporary), Milo Tchais is semi-permanent resident but generally we seem to see far fewer visiting Brazilian artists that our friends in USA or mainland Europe. So hats off to Cranio and lovely to see him poking fun at his experience as a Brazilian native painting in London.


Big Bus


The rich and vibrant colours work incredibly well in Cranio’s work outdoors, the characters always pop off dark backgrounds so brighter backgrounds on a few of the canvasses in this show came as a bit of a surprise.


Red Bull Gives You Wings


You may also notice that both on the canvas and outdoors Cranio has avoided full on Pixacao. Cranio’s view is that Pixacao is a true Brazilian culture and it lives only in Brazil. Fair enough, good on him for not exploiting it abroad.


If This Was My Street


One more thing that beggars belief, all the way from Brazil, three or four weeks in town....show open for just four days!

More pics here

Cranio's flicks here