Documentary Films: Exploring Graffiti, Street Art & Urban Art

“The Humble and Sublime” is the name of a nice video, documenting the creation of a new painting for the the upcoming solo-show by famous graffiti artist El Mac in New York. Mac, who visited Berlin earlier this year for a live-painting together with Augustine Kofie, will present some astonishing acrylic paintings in his well-known rendering style. Born in Los Angeles in 1980 to an engineer and an artist, Mac has been creating and studying art independently since childhood. Raised primarily in Phoenix, he drew inspiration from the surrounding Mexican & Chicano culture of the American Southwest, religious art, pin-up art, graffiti, and a wide range of classic artists such as Caravaggio, Mucha, and Vermeer. (about El Mac) ...

I actually noticed that you can watch Banksy’s street art documentary “Exit Through The Gift Shop” online now, because someone uploaded it to the online video platform Vimeo! After I watched the film the first time I was a bit overexcited and wrote… Exit Through The Gift Shop is a masterpiece of a street art documentary, a great film for those who have no knowledge about street art and its pioneers and a even greater film for those you have! ...

Roa is probably one of the current most famous graffiti artists in Europe. His unique style, those great animal motives with its high recognition value and his Europe-wide presence are the reason for his success. Only a few weeks ago, first prints of his graffiti artworks were published! Recently the Fatcap Crew did a nice interview with the Belgian urban artist and talked with him about abandoned places, Jimi Hendrix, street art, of course his animals and many more… ...

There are a lot of good and often interesting street art and graffiti books out there, but another one you should keep in mind until its release in October, because I highly recommend it, is “Trespass - A History Of Uncommissioned Urban Art”! That book contains not only street art and graffiti but with interventions, artistic protest and propaganda art a more general urban art context, a bit like I do on this blog…At the moment, a lot of people around the world, including the Wooster Collective, Martha Cooper and WK Interact drum up business for the book and that Banksy has written the introduction should also be not that bad… ...

You know, I have a weakness for tape art and although it seems to be something like a part of a new ad-campaign (unfortunately I’m not able to understand Slovenian…), it’s rather interesting to see what these Slovenian artists, including Kitsch Nitsch, Fejzo, Jurij Lozič, Tilen Sepič and others did with some shopping carts full of tape… …most interesting about the videos is, that they show the flexible possibilities of tape as a tool for artists. It allows to more or less easily create simple as well as quite complex abstract patterns, installations, reduced respectively simplified images and so forth… ...

Some days ago, I stumbled upon a crazy stencil art book, which contains real cardboard stencils maybe 20 famous stencil artist from around the globe! Its name: “The Street Art Stencil Book”. When I first saw the book I thought “Oh, aha, another of these stencil art documentary books…” but when I took a closer look, I found these ready stencils and was dizzy. “The Street Art Stencil Book” includes articles about artists like Pure Evil, Blek Le Rat, XOOOOX, C215, M-City and others and, as I already said, an original stencil of each of them: ...

Recently I visited the Design Museum in London and stumble over an very interesting book, which unfortunately was totally new for me. Murals: Practiques, Murals, Contemporanies (2010) by the Joan Miró Foundation shows different aspects of the very interesting urban art form of mural painting! On about 140 colored pages, the book begin with the traditional work of different protagonists as the Soninke women of Mauritania and continues with the work of artists who generally intervene in public places, including Lothar Gotz (Germany), Scope One (Singapore), UTR Crew (Bosnia-Herzegovina), Brian Rea (USA), Nuria & Eltono (Spain and France) and others. ...

Do you remember that ominous massive paint attack in Berlin earlier this year? A group of unknown bikers hit the Rosenthaler Platz in the heart of Berlin and spilled about 500 liters of colorful, water-based environmentally-friendly paint on the asphalt. Back then, a rumor circulated in the web about whether this paint attack was just another form of guerrilla marketing or a brilliant urban art action? Massive Paint Attack Video Today the official documentary video, named “Painting Reality”, was published by IEPE & the anonymous crew! It shows the whole procedure of spilling paint on the junction, which only took a few seconds. ...

South America is like a hidden treasure chest for underground graffiti styles and street art innovations. Maybe it’s because of the far distance between Europe and countries like Argentina, Brazil or Venezuela, but every time I find something about urban art in South America I’m really impressed about their crazy ideas, rough styles and simple solutions for difficult situations. And it seems that there are a lot of other people, having the similar thoughts… ...

It’s always interesting to see the own city from a different view or in a different style, especially when it shows the urban flair and nice details of the local architecture. I already showed you some rather impressing city portraits, like New York in HD or in tilt-shift, Vancouver as a time lapse, Tokyo and Yokohama by night or the street life in London, but today I will show you an fucking awesome tilt-shift video of the sexiest city on earth: Berlin! ...