Graffiti Europe: Best Street Art & Urban Walls

Smash 137 is one of the most prolific graffiti artists in Europe and although some say, he is slightly exaggerating his (I would call it) abstract letter-layer-style, he still is one of my personal heroes when it comes to taking graffiti into galleries! For his upcoming show Beautiful Struggle at Speerstra Gallery in Switzerland, a short Who is Smash 137? video preview was published, presenting not just first views on the new Smash 137 canvas series, but showing also the master himself in action… ...

French graffiti artists Sowat (DMV) and Lek, invited 40 urban artists to paint an abandoned supermarket in the north of Paris since they discovered the great, decayed building in summer 2011! Just to make it clear, imagine an old, four storey supermarket and dozens of talented graffiti artists who paint and paint an paint…and film the results! Including stuff by Apotre, Bims, Blo, Bom.k, Boyane, Brusk, Deap, Dem189, Fléo, Gris1, Hobz, Honda, Jayone, Jaws, Kan, Katre, Monsieur Qui, O’clock, Onde, Outside, Rems, Romi, Sambre, Seth, Siao, Skio, Smo, Spei, Swiz and Tcheko, the building has now become - similar to the Ghostvillage or Underbelly Project - an illegal artistic residency. ...

Attentive Urban Art Core readers should already know what the somehow cryptic slogan Anamorphic Graffiti describes - those of you who have no clue should definitely check out the brilliant paintings by Italian art collective Truly Design, the latest stuff by Spanish urban art collective Boa Mistura, the murals by Ninja182 or these most current anamorphic graffiti works by French TSF crew! Using anamorphic painting techniques, makes it possible to create impressing murals, which can only be seen in their completeness from a specific angle – otherwise they look strange and distorted. As my Wikipedia-friends know, Anamorphosis is a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image. The word anamorphosis is derived from the Greek prefix ana-, meaning back or again, and the word morphe, meaning shape or form. ...

Graffiti room design is one of those trends, companies are using to improve their PR. The hotel Au Vieux Panier in Marseille is regularly asking artists to design one of their rooms - this time, they asked famous, self declared graffiti fetishist Tilt, who is well-known for painting onto female bodies and painted London’s Village Underground not long ago… …I first told them that I wasn’t interested doing just decoration in the room but I wanted to create something that will look more like an installation. I thought about it also as a huge canvas where I needed to think about the composition and play with the empty white part of the room to accentuate more the idea of Chaos on the other part. Then I asked my friend Tober who gat a great old school style for tags, Grizz who is also the man behind the camera and Don Cho who is a Hip Hop singer from Marseille but who used to be a tagger from my home town Toulouse. It took one week to do the whole thing cause the idea was to exaggerate what you can usually see in some abandoned places. Too much tags, too much drips, too much sentences, too much throw ups… What I also wanted to show is that people can appreciate any type of graffiti, even the more basic, it’s just a matter of point of view… ...

Famous German writer MadC just opened her recent solo graffiti show Between the lines at LaGrille Gallery in Switzerland and of course several people took loads of photos of her latest artworks, including in addition to brilliant canvas works, also a hand-printed, limited edition of a four colors, signed and numbered silkscreen print. On Saturday 4th of February my solo show opened at La Grille gallery in Yverdon Switzerland. It was a fantastic evening with lots of people coming by. (MadC) ...

Two of the very best and popular European graffiti artists, Nychos (here in Berlin) and Flying Fortress (here in Berlin) just teamed up in Vienna and made together a propper and massive start into 2012: Mother Bear Graffiti Nychos and Flying Fortress, both well-known for their clean, detailed characters created an impressing piece, showing the anatomy of a pregnant mother bear - what a great idea! Hopefully they are keen for some more collaboration productions this year - I will keep you posted. But now, watch the documentary and like their styles! ...

Tram graffiti are somehow special and furthermore rare at least in Berlin, for what reason it’s great to see those fantastic pictures from Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, the crew including Skar, Stop, Hiro, Enot, Egor and Poolk created for their tram graffiti video, which is simply called Tram! It documents in a minimal and quite manner the wintry atmosphere of a local tram yard and shows us graffiti artists taking advantage of the favourable, frosty situation to paint some iron… ...

Dutch graffiti-writing master, sculptor and urban artist ZEDZ realized a new fine art print he subsequently painted on a huge bridge in Milan - he calls it urban regeneration… From Art Print Study to Urban Regeneration Know for his very architectural, abstract style, ZEDZ investigates new forms of graffiti, by regarding graffiti as 3D objects. In this way he links sculpting and writing and creates an unique way of painting walls… ...

It seems to be quite popular at the moment to release great graffiti documentaries. After the public release of the entire Unlike U train-writing documentary and the announced release of the 1UP documentary, also Russian CHO crew got their own film! A month ago I told you about that phenomenal upcoming graffiti video documentary of, with and by one of the most sportive and diverse Russian crews, now the film was finally published! ...

Tags, throw-ups, extinguisher paintings - In his latest video, German Rigol documents a crew of Spanish graffiti vandals in the usually clean and tidy city of Barcelona and shows us in that way, what good behavior in an urban, graffiti context really means… The topic of tagging, bombing and street action is not new to German Rigol, who already got the world’s attention for his tag tools photo-series called Marker Fetish. ...