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 - October 2013

words, photos: NoLionsInEngland

October sees itself out with a celebration of the macabre by the ghoulish, while people who aren’t street artists celebrate Halloween. This month has been a cracking month for new art and splashes of colour in our world, a large portion attributable to the Moniker Art Fair relocating from its previous village underground spot to the Old Truman Brewery and bringing hordes of street artists to the Brick Lane area


Alex Face


Alex Face (Thailand), Bon (Thailand) and Mau Mau (deepest Somerset) came together on several walls, this little beauty involved interacting with the iconic ROA bird, giving it a leg which Bon’s psychedelic bird chops lumps out of while Mau Mau’s fox relishes toasting the resulting leg fillets over a dollar bill barbeque, though quite why Alex Face’s baby is having it’s ear served up on a plate isn’t quite clear. It’s always great when new street art pays respect and homage to its surroundings like this piece.


Mau Mau, Alex Face, Bon


Alex Face and Bon also created a real squirt of colour on a much less frequented wall off the Brick Lane beaten track.


Alex Face, Bon


Shoreditch Junk on Sclater St provides a permission wall which somehow manages to avoid the sterility of other muralista’s spots. This interaction/collaboration between Skeleton Cardboard and Nathan Bowen elevates a savage and brutal skirmish between War and Death to new bloody heights.


Nathan Bowen v. Skeleton Cardboard


On the same spot, RYCA created a wall of clone troopers in a spare moment in between creating one of the knock out gallery project installations for Moniker Projects.


Ryan Callanan


During the night of the "Great Equinoctial Storm" of October 2013 the heavy rain and wind combined to jet spray large stripes out of the mural and Ryan was so taken with the effect he came back with a much drippier clone trooper paste up composition zig zagging around sprawling gaps mimicking the storm damage filled with a stunning pop art styled star wars stencil motif.


Ryan Callanan


Clet Abraham from Florence made a return visit to modify our many No Entry signs, sightings have been reported from Kings Road to Shoreditch via the City. Previous visits yielded more or less just the sign man carrying a heavy weight but this time Abraham has put up all kinds of subversions from his full repertoire, more focus on Clet Abraham’s London activity HERE.





Clet Abraham


C3 from Birmingham has been peppered all over Shoreditch in the past few months, the D7606 collaboration effect we call it, so it has been nice to see some of her own stuff on heavyweight parcel paper. She’s a heart breaker.


C3


Amanda Marie from Colorado USA was over for a Moniker Projects installation and she found a moment after that hectic weekend for a naughty bit of un-authorised stencil activity on a wall which years ago used to be one of the go-to walls for Shoreditch street artists.


Amanda Marie


Blair Zaye is a London street artist whose work appears infrequently but who does go back a few years, in October he had the interesting idea of installing a network of drainpipes which symbollically drained the surplus colour washing off the walls of Shoreditch, while this weary eye keeps an eye on proceedings.


Blair Zaye


T.Wat has been raising the bar on the street art sculpture game.  The welding, papier-mâché and painting involved in creating this illegally installed bomb must be seen to be appreciated and you can see just that by clicking here.


T.Wat


DScreet has featured music lyrics across his owl imagery before and now he leads the Lou Reed tributes with this beautiful Velvet Underground “I’ll Be Your Mirror” lyrics piece and in the process reclaims a long running Burning Candy/Dscreet wall from an equally stunning Soker Uno piece which also featured …. a mirror…cue X-Files music.


DScreet



Soker Uno



Another spooky Lou Reed related image…this banana by RYCA mimics the Warhol Velvet Underground album cover and was done as a side bar to the main Warhol-esque storm damaged clone trooper paste up mural but it was painted a couple of days before Lou Reed passed away.


RYCA


Trust Icon has a little pop at the commercialisation of street art, nice paste up humour from someone whose last round of street art was such a blatant commercial that he turned a photo of the paste up into the show flyer ;-)


Trust Icon


Finally, yet more by the legendary globally up artist Anonymous, the first an understated metal sculpture not spotted by many passing eyes, the second proving the enduring appeal of well observed and executed comedy genitalia


Unknown



Unknown


So the month of October celebrates death but unusually street artists actually ended up celebrating the hugely influential life of a genius lived to the full.