Monday 13 September 2021
Scenes From Whitecross Street Party 2021
Neonita Work In Progress
Stage watchers overlooked by Mr Cenz's epic futuristic portrait
Gent 48
Filthy Luker inflatable paintbrush with rainbow painting by Stika
Boris The Spider and his web of lies by Spore and Mr Oliver Switch
Choir singing Glory Glory Hallelujah while Filthy Luker's Goofs menace them from above
This next shows Perspicere’s string art work in progress being admired by three passing policewomen.
Perspicere string art gets police attention
Perspicere’s string street art has been a familiar sight over the last decade and these super complex string portraits are a new form of his art which have been appearing on the streets in the past year.
Regrettably I could not get to Perspicere’s solo show at BSMT Space last month so this was the first chance I had to see the string portraits being created live and it is just jaw dropping. Here is a short clip made yesterday at the Whitecross Street Party showing how magic is made.
Perspicere making magic happen
Artist Links: Perspicere instagram
Neonita Website
Mr Cenz instagram
Gent 48 instagram
Filthy Luker website
Stikka instagram
Spore instagram
Mr Oliver Switch instagram
All photos and video: Dave Stuart
Thursday 20 August 2020
disCONNECT: 1 house 10 artists
DisCONNECT
South London
24 July - 24 August 2020
Crunching up the gravel drive to a flight of steps leading to a house in a posh terrace set back from leafy Clapham Common, we peered through white double doors in an anonymous raised ground floor entrance. As a setting for a cutting edge urban art show it seemed quite unlikely, we turned on our heels lest they set the hounds on us. A door creaked open and a voice called “Looking for the art?”
The premise behind "disCONNECT" is that someone with money has bought a seriously expensive house and prior to doing an iceberg basement redevelopment job has invited 10 artists in to make-over the premises. Viruses escaping from labs threw a spanner in the works though, so several of the artists incorporate a sense of the pandemic in their pieces and 6 of the artists being based overseas had to make and install their work using Skype, like scientists cautiously tweaking the location of the reactor rods by remote cctv.
Herakut, Germany
The Art world is not providing too much in the way of real life excitement these days and while one should never confuse the art world with the real world, or indeed the world of street art, it was a pleasure to experience disCONNECT for real just before it closes this week.
If I had been asked 2 weeks ago to guess which artists would feature on my uploads more than once in the next month, it would have been
a hell of a rollcall before the name Alex Fakso came up. This legendary trainyard graff snapper specialises
in candid portraiture; his 2012 “Santa
in Camo” show in Kensal Rise indicated a quite idiosyncratic approach to
subject as did his 2017 Moniker contribution.
In this installation crowds in the photos rush towards the viewer in a way that feels
horrifyingly alien in these public-gathering avoiding socially distanced
coronavirus times.
Seeing Zoerism’s geometric and intricate graffiti on the streets is a rare pleasure and his anamorphic experience echoed that hugely detailed style. Anamorphic images are designed to be viewed from one spot and look a bit skew-whiff from any other, this image was installed flat on the floor and up against the wall creating this impressive 3D “trick of the eye”.
Zoer
Herakut’s fusion of photorealism and spindly elfin characters in Davy Crockett hats shouldn’t work but looks awesome. You are invited to sit for a selfie with the monkey in the nursery - if your chess game is up to scratch. The kids in the playroom have painted child-like drawings on the nursery walls, they are credited to a 7 year old Ryker but is there a hint of an insider joke there?
A double set of doors and a single door were shipped to Portugal for Vhils to work his magic, a refreshing reminder of his talent for “discovered texture” portraiture. His mining into layers of adverts to reveal portraits works superbly where it belongs, out on the streets but it’s a bit of a puzzle why having an implausibly deep block of compressed billboard adverts would work indoors.
Vhils
The dark entrance lobby was made over by a collection of Mr Cenz’ cosmic ladies, UV light brought sharpness to the highlights that define the outline of the faces, an effect we love to play with when photographing his portraits out on the streets. Unfortunately we omitted to get any photos in the lobby though the effect can be vaguely appreciated in this mercifully brief video snippet.
feat: Isaac Cordal, Mr Cenz, Aida Wild, Zoerism
In lockdown Aida Wilde railed against the reckless anti social behaviour of people ignoring the social distancing, lockdown "stay-the-fuck-away" instructions. Her “Granny alley” installation in the most challenging room in the house distills a lot of that passion and anger into blocks of text and her emoji infused pseudo-flock wallpaper.
Aida Wilde
Aida Wilde
After years of vicariously enjoying Icy and Sot’s art finally we saw a piece in real life. The dining table apparently was found in the kitchen, in which case it must have been a relic from the downstairs kitchen many years ago. The beautifully conceived and executed articulated plates and cutlery apparently represent capitalism with the extension leaves up and a full plate on the table. With the extension down symbolised socialism, in which case this neither-up-nor-down configuration pretty much sums up post-Corbyn Labour.
Icy and Sot
Issac Cordal’s morose concrete figures endured this Summer’s monsoon in the garden and just about maintained their social distance in a gloomy basement.
Isaac Cordal
Flock was clearly in vogue when the house was last given a decor update as the pattern recurs in several of the installations. Adam Neate bid for the window blinds and the colour and texture makes a great skin motif in his ghostly portraiture
Adam Neate
This show exceeded expectations, though that says more about our expectations than the artists involved. The unbalanced capitalisation of the show title exhorts to us to somehow re-connect in these desperate times where isolation is salvation and this show is worth connecting with. Time is running out though and indeed thanks to covid restrictions tickets are very limited.
All photos: Dave StuartThursday 23 August 2018
Shoreditch Connectivity - A Big New Mural
That has now changed, a beautiful mural on the theme of “connectivity” which truly stands alongside the best in the world has been created in Shoreditch and it is stunning. The fun started in Spring this year and went on until August, 8 groups of artists working in pairs have painted a long montage of murals thematically linked on the idea of “connectivity”. The whole piece has been placed with permission on a building owned by a communications company and Graffoto has had the pleasure of discussing many aspects of this brilliant new mural with Lee Bofkin representing Global Street Art which managed the project.
Busk and Oliver Switch, flanked by Ninth Seal and Best Ever to left, Ed Hicks and Dr Zadok to right
First, a little flash back. This building for the past 20 years has been a rather intimidating, austere and genuinely brutal edifice. Any art or graffiti that appeared on the building was very swiftly dealt with using high pressure water jets.
Colt building in Background, gray, anonymous 2010. Foreground fairground now houses CitizenM hotel.
genuinely brutal!
The hazy discolouration that evolved over repeated pressure jet cleaning of the walls down the years can be seen in the lower 6 foot of the walls.
Security – stab people (augmentation by artist unknown)
The first visible signs of dramatic change appeared in March 2018 when Hunto and Mr Thoms painted the end or perhaps the start of the building. Lee explained; “The people who own the building are Colt, the technology company. They moved into the adjacent building, there was a big office refurbishment and Global Street Art was able to secure permission for artists to paint on the building site hoardings. We knew them from that project and it was a little conversation that resulted from that. Years later they came up with the idea [for the mural] and we said “yeah we can help with that”.
Cix Mugre, LibreHem and Spaik 45, Mexico comes to UK #MXUK2015
“They suggested the theme of connectivity, and that changed how we thought about it, we realised no one had ever been given the opportunity to do something so big and we really wanted to make it work so we thought we’d take the theme of connectivity and make a literal interpretation of it within each section, so each section would be painted by a pair of artists so they would connect directly with eachother within that section. There was a lot of behind the scenes work coordinating the design, between the Global Street Art team as well as the individual artists, we then composited the ideas together to give a sense of the whole, then we had the conversations with each of the pairs of artists as to how they would each make it blend with the sections adjacent to them. The artists then painted in chunks!”
Shoreditch Connectivity: Hunto & Mr Thoms
The hard work on the connections really paid off, and a great example of this can be seen in how the network of talkers, listeners and webcams painted by Thoms connects into the kissing cubist couple by Hunto and then the pipes in the network were left hanging on the fringes until Captain Kris and Tizer came along to paint the next section.
Then we can see how Captain Kris and Tizer, in their section which depicts a connection between the real and the virtual, took the hanging connections and blended them into their artwork, in particular the yellow conduit at the bottom morphs into a triangular branch like enclosure which closes right at the point where the robot with the VR headset is connecting with the female dancer.
Captain Kris & Tizer
The dancers are dancing on a woodland floor which then flows seamlessly into the amazing woodland scene by Ed Hicks and Dr Zadok.
Captain Kris & Tizer cut some rug
The connectivity depicted in the Hicks/Zadok woodland is provided by the fungal mycelium network, an organic information superhighway which actually really connects plants, trees and mushrooms across the forest floor.
Ed Hicks, Zadok - The Mycelium network
The corner panel where King John Court meets New Inn Yard supports a vanitas painting by Busk and Mr Switch. The connection aspect here is the ammonite shell at the top which has not changed over millennia and thus provides a connection across the ages.
Busk & Mr Oliver Switch
Intended or otherwise, there may be another connection in this section as directly across the road from this corner panel is the HQ of Amnesty International, Amnesty’s logo is a candle entrapped by barbed wire, the candle in the Busk/Switch composition may be making a conection with the Amnesty International candle.
Amnesty International Logo copyright Amnesty International
This then flows into a collection of hands in a lattice structure, the hands depict meetings, greetings, introductions, friendships, Ninth Seal and Best Ever have captured a very human form of connectivity.
Mobile connectivity
Next to this is a beautiful tribute to old school modes of connection and communication by Nomad Clan, a pair of artists from Manchester. The lost art of letter writing sits alongside the pigeon post, now superseded by email.
Nomad Clan Rewind
Those curious double headed arrow symbols in Nomad Clan’s art will be instantly familiar as “fast forward” and “rewind” to anyone who ever played or recorded on C60 and C90 cassettes. The fast forward arrow draws your eye to a collaboration between Mr Cenz whose multicoloured portraits are a familiar sight across London and Lovepusher, known for his amazing 3D letter writing. On the left Nomad Clan pay homage to retro connectivity, the female character to the right has the future of connectivity in the palm of her hand.
Future Future: Lovepusher and Mr Cenz work-in-progress
Future - Lovepusher and Mr Cenz
Connectivity past, present and future
The whole project in its current form (not to suggest that this is anything other than the final manifestation) was brought to a conclusion by an abstract multi layered network created by AutOne and Neist whose complex handstyle we have loved for years.
AutOne, Neist
Graffoto was very curious about the choice of artists and how they were paired together so it was great to get Lee's take on that. “It was conversations with the team here at Global Street Art, I had the sense of.. well pretty much everyone we have known or worked with over years and years, we’re six years in now and we had a sense of who would work well with the theme. There were also some people that we really wanted to work with, we wanted Tizer to paint a big wall and he’s been looking for a big wall so a natural pairing for us for Tizer was Captain Kris.”
Lee explains how the sections become progressively less and less illustrative as you work away from Hunto and Mr Thoms at the start.
“In the end with Autone and Neist the style had to be abstract because the space is broken up and layered, so that kind of made sense for a geometric abstract and Autone’s work is about maps and connectivity, it’s that sort of inspiration and it would work brilliantly with Neist and they have gotten on really well and their styles have meshed really beautifully together so we’re super chuffed with this.” Lee said.
Networks, connections, real, painted.... AutOne and Neist
The organisation and logistics behind such a colossal mural is also hugely impressive and generally is something that Global Street Art is tremendously qualified to undertake. Just a few stats making the rounds: the mural is about 115m along its base and 13m tall making a surface area of almost 1500square metres; 250 litres of black emulsion (who buys black?) were applied as background and over 500 cans of spraypaint went into the painting.
Hicks, Zadok detail
“The building was so huge we couldn’t imagine painting it in one go just because it is logistically so difficult, the volume of materials is absolutely massive, technically having to close pavements with council permission, manage the traffic because Health and Safety is a huge part of what we do but its fairly thankless and invisible to coordinate all of that and the lifts and to not drop a lift through a utility cover in the road because you can’t park on, all of that went into it as well. To make it manageable we suggested breaking it down into 9 sections originally, the first pair Mr Thoms and Hunto painted two sections so in the end it was 8 pairs of artists.”
Danger, Global Street Art mulshing in progress
A colour palette was selected in dialogue with artists and building owners and generally was adhered to. “It’s such a big building it had to be a black background because if you stare at that much white paint you’ll get blinded in the Summer” Lee explains, “and that will get dirty quicker so the idea is that the black background would last a bit longer and it would fare a bit better against the dirt of the city. Also it’s one way of unifying the different sections if everyone starts with the same colour background.”
The end result of all these dynamics and the organisation and dare I say the connections is just about the most impressive, fresh, single piece themed collaborative mural Shoreditch has seen. All the artists involved deserve a magnificent pat on their respective backs and Lee and the Global Street Art team have every reason to feel very proud of this incredible achievement.
Smooth ankle v. pebble dash foot? Tizer detail
Hicks and Zadok Neurons Crackle
Links:
Global Street Art website
Hunto instagram
Mr Thoms instagram
Captain Kris instagram
Tizer instagram
Ed Hick instagram
Dr Zadok instagram
Busk One instagram
Mr Oliver Switch instagram
Best Ever instagram
Ninth Seal TBA
Nomad Clan instagram
Mr Cenz instagram
Lovepusher instagram
AutOne instagram
Neist instagram
All photos: Dave Stuart except Amnesty International Logo, copyright Amnesty International
Thursday 11 December 2014
London Street Art Highlights 2014
Undoubted star of the London street art scene this year was Spanish artist Borondo. Among a series of great pieces the stand out has to be the upside down canalside face in Hackney Wick, a gem of site specific dynamic art. With just the right wind, a gentle slop of the water surface results in a face whose lips mouth words silently and eyes that wink at you, pure genius.
Borondo
Working with a bunch of wooden planks found among the fly tipped materials lying in a car park, XO from Amsterdam produced a striking collage of wood grain and plank colours, topped with geometric string art. With a high novelty value quotient this was one of my favourite pieces this year.
XO
Italian visitor Luis Gomez painted at least three great murals in Shoreditch this year though the real stand out was his Narcissus, many folk missed his deft use of the different surface of the base of the “flower bed” to create the reflection of this vain creature.
Luis Gomez
Sell Out kept up a solid output of butterflies and sculptures throughout the year, with many visitors taking home a souvenir of Shoreditch’s street art courtesy of Sell Out’s blu-tacked butterflies. Some do find the way he imposes his art onto other people’s work rude or disrespectful but we have no problem with it, street art is ripe for modification and interaction the moment the artist leaves the wall (but not before!).
Sell Out
As always lot of great stickers have appeared throughout Shoreditch, we loved this burst of fiendish colour brought to lampposts by Steek and Arrex.
Arrex (RX)
Street artist and gallerist Pure Evil embarked on a mission to create a piece of street art on the streets whereever he happened to be every day for 365 days. A number of his pieces were commemorative including tributes to Kieth Haring, JFK and Robbo and the work became highly personal and poignant with the sad loss of his father to cancer during the year.
Pure Evil
Another artist from abroad who stayed to make a big contribution was Furia ACK from Portugal. His first chalk and charcoal portraits were the very definition of ephemeral as rain eroded and softened the chalk highlights. He then specialised in people’s heroes usually connected to a defining moment of historical change where oppressed people asserted a wish to be free from despotic tyranny. More recently he has moved on to icons of female power.
Furia ACK (also feat. WRDSMTH)
Another artist on a political bent was HKG, addressing social politics, geo politics and environmental politics, it all boils down to them and us, and greed.
HKG
We saw a number of conscience driven activist art campaigns during the year. Masai’s endangered species slant on environmentalism crystalised in two campaigns, the first raising awareness of the consequences of bee wipeout and the second in conjunction with the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Animals) and Synchronicity Earth highlighted the perils of endangered species in the UK.
Masai
Sadly no year is complete without its fallen soldiers and this year saw the London graffiti and street art community mourn two significant losses. Robbo WRH WD PFB succumbed after a 3 years in a coma to injuries sustained in an accident. Palpable grief was expressed not just throughout the London graff brotherhood but worldwide with many writers paying tribute on walls dedicated to King Robbo.
Robbo tribute by DASR
Street artist BEN NAZ fought a hugely courageous battle against cancer, appearing at his solo show just weeks prior to his death when it was already known that the battle had been lost. He created a considerable amount of stencilled imagery in the past year or so before his sad departure.
Ben Naz RIP
The roaming spraycan art festival Meeting Of Styles returned to Shoreditch this year and produced some stunning permissioned murals, all technically exceptional and stunning to look at, probably defined by this signature wall on Network Rail property.
Gent48, Vibes RT, Odisy; bottom: Soker, Ders, Twesh
ALO continued his steady ascent in the art world with a solo show at the Saatchi Gallery but still found time to travel internationally and to add some beautiful portraits to Shoreditch surfaces.
ALO
One of the more controversial episodes this year involved a small number of youths paint bombing a portrait collaboration by Edwin and Josh. The youths contended that the face portrait, painted as a highly stylised pair of eyes and a nose across three shutters signified a one-eyed devil. Of course, nothing could really have been further from the truth of the artists' or the shutter owner’s intentions. Community censorship appeared to strike Saki and Bitches mildy eroticised geisha girls, and an image of a seating nude female by Benjamin Murphy had only the tape parts which defined the lady’s feminine charms buffed. Shoreditch has a significant Muslim population.
Edwin (not the defaced piece)
Saki and Bitches
Augmented reality technology came to the streets of Shoreditch for the first time courtesy of INSA's Cycle of Futility, INSA's Gif-iti Viewer, an iPhone app, replaces the static mural with the animated version of the artwork when viewed through the phone on the street. You can get a weak proxy to the experience by downloading the app and pointing it at the static photo in this blog post. Amaze your friends!
INSA
A curious population of sweet little bug eyed creatures exploded all over Shoreditch this year courtesy of Noriaki and boy do we love them. No corner is too dark or dank or remote for these unobtrusive people, they remind me of the way Monsieur Andre's character populated Paris or even Banksy's rats in the middle of the last decade.
Noriaki
Because the night ...belongs to artists, night time photography has produced a number of fun and pleasing photographs which are included here just because we can
Mr Cenz
Code FC, Graffiti Life behind
Nemo, Rask
For a slightly quirkier look at some of the great art created on Shoreditch streets in 2014, there is a slideshow of the finished versions of some of the street art the Shoreditch Street Art Tour came across during their creation, click here.
We’d love to include a shed load more highlights but the quantity of art and the number artists seen on the walls of Shoreditch this year was extraordinary. Going to finish with a slide show of just a few of the many many pieces that really impressed us this year. Let’s just say that all their efforts have been seen and appreciated and we wish all artists a fantastic and productive 2015.