Graffiti Europe: Best Street Art & Urban Walls

When it comes to graffiti in Berlin, the 1UP crew reigns supreme. This prolific group from Kreuzberg has not only made their mark across the city with their daring rooftop rollers and train bombings, but they’ve also taken their art global. In addition to releasing their own documentary, “1UP Graffiti – One United Power”, showcasing their work in Berlin and around the world, the crew has also established a strong online presence with their dedicated YouTube channel, “1UP Graffiti TV.” ...

With a line-up reading like the who-is-who of Europe’s urban mural artists - including DXTR, Nychos, Pixelpancho, Etam Cru, Arsek & Erase, ECB and many more - the probably biggest European street art festival Like it. Art, which took place in Kazan, the capital and largest city of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan, just finished. As promised a few days ago, I managed to get some impressions from there… Like it. Art Festival Large and medium scale graffiti appeared on the walls of around 40 objects across the city. The festival arranged under the project MadeInKazan also encompassed public master classes, lectures of the European artists, the best canvases exhibition, “Trash-truck hunting” night painting session and a graffiti contest. ...

The urban art festival Frontier in Italy aims to be an important opportunity to show and underline how much the art of Writing and of Street Art have been so prominent and pioneering for the development of the contemporary international art scene, taking Bologna as an historical centre of production and observation. Recently, German 3D graffiti master DAIM finished a massive mural after eight days of work! The mural, located near the City Hall building at Via Fioravanti, now shows several layers of three-dimensional stars and a some writing popping out of the wall. Dope work again! ...

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)… ...

Almost a year after his collaboration show with Stormie Mills, famous abstract graffiti artist Remi Rough is back at Unit44 gallery in Newcastle and just shared some photos of his latest artworks for that recent solo-exhibition! Entitled How to use colour to manipulate people the show presents sculptural work and paintings, that are a big departure from his earlier graffiti paintings… The sculptural work is reminiscent of Serra, his lines and forced shapes brought to life as 3D objects in both wood and clay. ascending to a third dimension seems almost obvious with Remi’s work. Whilst Remi’s new paintings are more referential to his earlier work from 5 years ago, using bitumen and matt emulsion and still maintaining a tight narrative of tension which is a constant in his work. These are abstract works, yet they are firmly rooted in reality. (Unit 44) ...

Did you know that 20,000 Toys worldwide have no access to fresh spraypaint and that Every day 5000 toys do scrapcan tags over good pieces? Because of his big heart for Toys and the fact that this is only the tip of the iceberg, graffiti writer Lush just found the new “charity” ToyVision, a humanitarian fund for graffiti toys, who are in desperate need for some spray paint and guidance from the elders… ...

I just spent the last 30 minutes zapping through Calligraphi.ca, a nice tumblr just about calligraphy and hand drawn type! Calligraphica features the calligraphically works by a dozen talented urban artists, designers and taggers, namely Andrei Robu, Eduard Dimasov, Giuseppe Salerno, Greg Papagrigoriou, Joluvian, Kinessisk, Luke Lucas, Michel D’anastasio, Misha Karagezyan, Sergey Shapiro, Spit and Theosone. Using flat brushes and paint on walls, wooden sticks and ink on paper, calligraphy pens or brush pens, those dudes know what they are doing. But in my eyes, especially Greg Papagrigoriou is killin’ it! ...

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. ...

On a hot-looking sunny day last week, RNG crew went big in Moscow! Although they cross handshaked each other (in Germany there’s a saying that cross shaking hands is going to bring ill luck) the RNG crew was in luck or well-prepared when they bombed that huge noise barrier in Moscow, some of them just wearing pants… This, in addition to the almost legendary CHO crew actions and the beautiful tram graffiti, is a conformation for my personal theory about graffiti in Russia, Russian crews and the somehow visible Russian mentality. Anyway, this RNG bombing was a huge effort - show them your love! ...

During the Katowice Street Art Festival in Poland, popular urban artist Nawer (remember his great collaboration with Graphic Surgery?) teamed up again with the motion graphic artists of Temporary Space Design and created a pretty great multimedia installation! Like other projects they did together, this installation explores space in two dimensional graphics. The attempt to breathe life into an image and bring a sense of motion and dynamic to a static form is in my opinion a really interesting approach, allowing to create impressing results as you can see in the video documenting also parts of the progress. ...