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 July 2013

photos: HowAboutNo
words: NoLionsInEngland

July had to man up to follow the excellent street art Shoreditch has seen in the past few months and boy did it deliver.  Things cannot get more manly than having Luther on the BBC swagger around in front of street art and graffiti performing miraculous feats of apparent teleporting from one spot to another in a gritty East London TV cop drama.  Among many receiving product placement name checks were the TRP crew out on the Wick, Obit and 616.

July sees a double gold medal awarded to Francisco de Pajaro aka Street Art Is Trash for both top new name to Graffoto AND top keeping it real ephemeral street art.  NoLions wrote a guest blog very recently about this exciting artist for the scene's global daily news spinner Vandalog.  No sooner did he write "no commercial agenda at all", the very next day a gallery announces a "Art Is Trash" show.  Time to despair!

A name we don't come across often is Ian Stevenson who is responsible for the "Just Look At THis" mural. Predictably some wag with long arms edited the "HIS" part of the mural to "ITS" but it was rapidly changed back, and we chanced upon Mr Stevenson one day bouncing around behind Leonard St painting big sloppy white grins on dumpsters.

Art Is Trash v. unknown - a nice use of street furniture and modification of an existing paste up:

Another new name working in a Swoon/Elbow toe/Armsrock style is Vytautus:

Alex Dias painstakingly painted this elephant/octopus hybrid on a permissioned wall on Hanbury St, the detail in the ink painting is incredible and it was impressive to see the background be added after the main beast was painted without painting over its edges.

Graff writing has been making a re-appearance in Shoreditch again, here WOT has produced a burn baby burn fill over a Probs aerosol abstract wispiness

More Probs asbtract aerosol spray with a toyist response from unknown

We haven't seen Jumbo aka Jumboism up on walls around this parish for quite a while so it has been nice to track a variety of stickers suggesting he/she has visited recently

Miss Van's work is awesome and she lined up with Ciro Schu and Pure Evil to paint a burning wall in Shoredditch and because I think you lot see too much of that kind of stuff on the internet already, I'm not going to show the breasts in this mural.

ACE:

EINE - still up and it was sunny, only took me 6 months to get this shot.

Classic Zomby character and Fuel letters, perhaps in response to some bizarre accusations on the net regarding certain commercial interests sponsoring the dogging of street art murals

Sheryo and the Yok, New York's finest were around in connection with the "Above The Rail" show from the White Canvas Project guys, We're not sure they did anything substantial on the London streets but it was nice to catch the odd sticker or two.

Two cultures cohabiting alongside eachother!

You'd have to be blind to not have seen that Shoreditch has been battered by Above stickers and luckily he completed one nice shutter before he continued his international perambulations to, errrrr, Hastings. All other shutters except the first Brick Lane one were on the coast.

Miss Van – Lovestain

Stolen Space, Old Truman Brewery, London
1 – 18 October 2009


all photos: NoLionsInEngland except W10 where noted


Miss Van - Lovestain


In a year which has seen fewer significant international street artists coming to grace the walls of London’s grittier galleries it is a relief to find a major artist prepared to stage a large scale show. Miss Van is renowned for the coquettish femine figures she calls her dolls or “poupees” and throughout this vast exhibition she doesn't scrimp with these gorgeous sultry beauties.


Miss Van - Lovestain


Sightings of authentic Miss Van originals are rare on the London streets and thus far, sadly, no sightings of new street Miss Vans have been recorded. This one from Ladbroke Grove goes back a few years, thanks to W10 for the flick.


Miss Van – Ladbroke Grove c. 2003 - photo W10 (thanks)


Lovestain is partly retrospective and partly new 2009 material and is presented within two separate spaces in the same block within the Old Truman Brewery. The new Lovestain material is in the smaller permanent Stolen Space venue.




There seem to be a couple of recently new twists to the Miss Van style. The first development introduces the rather uncertain show title; a collection of images of pious, angelic and saintly females have been modified to look like clowns, each piece called an Inmaculada. Throughout the retrospective, none of the pieces shown are anything other than 100% Miss Van creations whereas a significant portion of the new material works on an existing image from some other source. An IMmaculada is a Spanish Catholic reference to the virgin Mary’s immaculate conception or, in the more literal interpretation of the Spanish devotion, “without stain”. The English prefix IN quite often in English conveys a sense of negative and opposite, think incapable versus capable, so Miss Van seems to be setting up her show to represent the opposite of the immaculate conception, a celebration of physical love. And you thought it referred to something disgusting didn’t you.


Inmaculada


Anyone else seeing Gene Simmonds in there? The subversion of religious imagery is taken even further in the bastardisation of a religious relief of Virgin Mary, and in this one the Miss Van-isation becomes almost sinister


Inmaculada statue


The second twist is that Miss Van has taken the circus elements seen in the 2008 series “Still A Little Magic” and morphed her poupees into clowns. Not clowns in gay, cheerful make –em laff mode but the sad eyes behind the smile kind of real-clown.


Lovestain 2


Obviously a pretty female remain a pretty female no matter what her mood and the most recent Miss Van poupees have been painted with a darker and meaner disposition yet without losing that femme fatale appeal. The lips are smeared in thick clown make-up a la Robert Smith but the puckering has collapsed and distorted into a snarl. Like the aloof but beautiful Goths you couldn’t approach at school, you can take one of these a beauty like this home but you know she’ll be a silent ice maiden, she’ll sniff at your interior decor, she’ll be expensive and she won’t get on with your friends but you’ll be her slave for life if you can possess her.


Lovestain 7


Present but not as prominent in as in previous work are the flaming straw coloured waterfalls of hair. Although mainly tied up in bobs or hidden under hats, the one instance in the new work where the hair is big, floaty and flaming it becomes a major factor in making Lovestain 5 the show-stopping painting it is, a single melancholy masqued pas-joyeuse sits with a fox to her left and a halo of candles but the hair sets a gorgeous golden tone to the painting and provides the contrast for highlighting for the milkiness of the breasts straining the harlequin corset. Whilst at some point the inner perve was bound to emerge, you’ll observe that no link is being made between the candle flame and the wax candle images and any symbolic connection to the show title. None.



Lovestain 5


Lovestain Retrospective

The retrospective part of the show picks up Miss Van’s story from 2003 with about 40 paintings on canvas and wood as well as a couple of installations. This larger space has hugely un-forgiving top to bottom windows on two sides and the consequence is that the space is a bit un-forgiving for laying out (even Downey’s street sign sputnik looked pretty lost and awkward in the vast truman brewery pampas)




The earliest female figures are less three dimensional, the hair hasn’t become the yellow abundance of the last few years and eyes are part open, almost suggesting an alluring flutter of the eyelids.


Untitled 64 – 2003


In more recent times, the figures acquire a more solid form, colours take a richer deeper hue, the hair becomes hugely significant and in almost all paintings post 2006 the eyes are closed and smudged. Animals appear in the composition, often conventionally as a companion, occasionally as guardians and even as possibly mythical or fantasy based symbolisms.


Flaming Bird 1 – 2007


The fox makes recurs in many on the later retrospective pieces though there is a period through 2007 where the female figures become inter-twined with skulls of horned beasts, both in the canvasses and on a trio of paintings on leather


untitled on leather – 2007


With many of the animals, though they look at first glance like either a fem-warriors battle headdress or dead animal stole, there is something sexual about the way the animals cover and embrace the women, so much so that the viewer is invited to speculate that the animals actually symbolise the male of the species.


Fox Hair – 2006


A significant installation Entering an almost enclosed changing screen under an hanging chandelier draped in flaxen hair, the observer is surrounded by voluptuous semi naked long haired beauties each bearing a single candle, their eyes downcast, they watch over the observer. It is impossible for a man to pick fault with this.


every changing screen should be like this


A retrospective involves dicing with fortune, danger lurks, will people hark back to days when the artist was fresh, vital and bristling, will any particular period be found wanting. No problem with Miss Van though, her style and quality are remarkably consistent and she retains in every painting a subtle but erotically charged appeal. If only she could have painted something on the streets.



Obviously with so much material on display the pictures here are only a fraction of the show, there is a fuller photo set of the new Lovestain material here and there are a lot more pictures of the retrospective part of the show here