Explore Vibrant European Urban Art Scenes

Between 2009 and the end of 2012, I was deeply embedded in the global street art scene. During those peak years, my blog, urbanartcore.eu, grew into one of Europe’s primary digital hubs for graffiti and urban art culture. It was a daily log of a specific era of hype, documenting the movement as it exploded across walls from Berlin to Bristol. After 2012, the project sat stale. It remained online, a silent archive of that era, until 2016. ...

After releasing their Urban Art Guide Vienna and showing Usual Misdeeds by Vinz, Inoperable Gallery in Vienna is going to present the next big thing: Next week, famous ETAM Cru is going to open their Mind Trip exhibition… The Polish duo will make their way to Vienna for their first show in Austria. We are excited to welcome them here and look forward to seeing what they have in store for us! Stay tuned for more info. ...

ETAM Crew, who recently was part of the Like it. Art festival in Russia, is now in Poland! Sainer, one of the ETAM members, just painted another beauty in Lodz… Filmed by one-media.pl, this video documents the entire Sainer mural painting process what’s great to see not just for all those being not familiar with mural art, but also for ever urban art enthusiast. Again, this mural is part of the fantastic Urban Forms project with its great aspiration: ...

For two years now, I’m following the creative development of Italian street artist and yarn-bomber Moneyless and I have to say, I really love to the the progress his artwork’s evolution. Whereas the first artworks where simple plain geometrically yarn-patterns on walls, his latest works include more complex, three-dimensional rope structures wafting in the air as well as pretty nice geometrically murals and prints… For Fame Festival 2012, he recently brought together samples of all his skills. Documented by some videographers, Moneyless scratched, screen-printed, painted and stretched ropes in the small Italian city of Grottaglie! ...

Since 2011, the urban art festival Crimes of Minds invites different artists from different countries to the French city of Brest to paint some walls. Today, about 20 graffiti and street artists including C215, Jef Aérosol, Best Ever, Guy Denning, Da Mental Vaporz, Morten Andersen and many more followed their invitations and started to transform the city into an urban art museum. Before the project will release a book and a film with some videos of each episode in 2013, here are some first photos (by Kevin Perro) of the finished collaboration mural by Liliwenn and Bom K (DMV)… ...

What does the Higgs Boson look like? That’s a question, many people around the world would like to know. Artist Josef Kristofoletti now got the great honour to paint a part of the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)! Commissioned by the ATLAS Experiment at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Kristofoletti painted a three story tall mural on the side of the ATLAS control room directly above the detector, near the Swiss-French border outside of Geneva… ...

Spontaneous sculpture artist Brad Downey and Akay (tenderly named Brakay) again visited the lovely Italian city of Grottaglie! For Fame Festival 2012, both artists created an explosive paint installation consisting of several paint bombs, colorizing an abandoned house… Not sure how they initialized the detonations, but it looks like they did not use electricity to do that. Maybe it’s some kind of yeast or something like that. If anyone has a clue, please write a comment - I’d love to have some details! ...

Between September 13th and 16th, 2012 the Stroke Urban Art Fair 2012 will take place once again at the Postbahnhof in Berlin, bringing hundreds of artists and more or less urban art related galleries together in one big arena… Within the last two years, more than 60,000 visitors came to see artists and galleries from all over the world (Poland, Brazil, Austria, USA, Italy, France, Chile, Spain, Switzerland or the UK - just to name a few). Urban Art is now! In fact the huge variety of subcultural dynamics of the last 30 years in this melting pot is self-replicating. Terms such as “Low Brow”, “Street Art”, “Graffiti”, “Illustration”, “Graphic Design” or “Comic Art” are fused with classic notions of art as well as unconventional resources and are newly interpreted in a fresh, innovative context. ...

I just stumbled upon a six month old project by Czech urban art crew EPOS 257 entitled Urban Shooting Paintings! For the Urban Shooting Paintings EPOS 257, who became popular with the 50 square meters of public space intervention in Prague, uses homemade weapon and ammunition… The theme – a gesture signalling an attack – remains the same. Its essence, however, relates more to the very roots of guerrilla art, established at the end of the 1960s in the US by activist groups refashioning billboard adverts.I move around with the weapon in the open urban landscape. In my case, it is not an attack on a particular advert but billboard as a medium in general, which in this context represents a painter’s canvas in the urban landscape. (EPOS 257) ...

As I already mentioned here, here and here French Da Mental Vaporz crew (DMV) is my most favorite European graffiti crew. Recently they came up with a beautiful behind the scenes video… The Crew Da Mental Vaporz was born in 1999 at the initiative of Bom.k and Iso in the Paris suburbs. Soon joined by Kan, they stand out by making huge frescoes in the sordid land of the southern suburbs, giving the most to topics outside the tradition of graffiti (hitherto confined to the sacrosanct lettering / comic book character bubbles). Thus, their productions, that can extend over tens of meters high and long, depict the monstrous madness, upholstery and imminent end of time. ...