Art Installations: Urban Interventions & Public Space

2011 was a really successful year for German urban artist Clemens Behr who not just explored urban places and spaces around the world by creating amazing cardboard installations in public space, but also exhibited in Berlin, his adoptive home! Exploring urban places… Clemens loves working with recycled materials and basic geometric forms. His abstract installations, composed of cardboard, wood, paint, tape and found materials, often result in subtle confusions between 2D painting and 3D objects. ...

Hey boys and girls, it’s almost X-mas, for what reason I’d like to give you another urban art link-tips special including the latest street art and graffiti news I wasn’t able to pack into a proper post. So stay inside, grab a coffee or tea and enjoy the following links! Peace. Designer Kyle Bean creates very interesting stuff like that London Tube Map made of drinking straws! Playing with wood, paint and shadows, the two French artists Sambre and Lek just constucted an awesome indoor installation in Paris. ...

Organised by Ironside, the two Berlin-based urban artists Buff Diss and Clemens Behr created a nice cardboard and tape art installation for the urban art x-mas market Stattmarkt which took place in the Stattbad Berlin rooms during the last two days… I bumped into them during the setup on Friday and took some quick shots of both preparing their collaboration installation. In my eyes, the Australian street art veteran and the talented student from the renown Berlin University of the Arts are an urban art dream-team due to the fact, that their preferred materials (cardboard and wood vs. tape) and styles (3D installations vs. 2D tape art) complement each other ! ...

…and then we hit the streets. Phone booths, bus stops, news stands, subway entrances, the platforms of our transit systems, the insides of our trains, the walls of our city, the tops of our cabs, our buses, inside and out, carry private commercial messages to us as we moved through the city. All of these messages carry outdoor advertising to a captive audience, creating desires where there were none before, for products we scarcely need… ...

Last Friday, Berlin’s Neurotitan Gallery opened its doors for another nice group-exhibition entitled Simple is Rare, presenting diverse artwork by different urban-inspired artists like Herr Orm, K 110 and Robert Matzke, just to name a few… Although or probably because of this exhibition’s major topic was simplicity, it was the huge and very complex installation by Clemens Behr which dominated the show-room. By combining cardboard, tape, neon light, paint and wood his walkable and impressing tunnel-like architecture draw almost my entire attention. Of course I took some photos from inside the installation - Take a look and be impressed! ...

My friend, Berlin-based urban artist Clemens Behr recently updated his website and added some neat photos of his latest cardboard installations from Amiens, Paris, Berlin, Vienna and Malmo and again - after these dope installations in New York and Barcelona - I’m highly impressed about what’s possible to create by simply using cardboard, tape, wood and paint… Behr has taken his work into the public sphere, building peculiar appendages in metro cars and erecting detailed miniature cities on street corners. (about Clemens Behr) ...

The Spanish urban art collective Boa Mistura (consisting of the five artists Arkoh, Derko, Pahg, Purone and Rdick) just informed me about their latest installation: Entitled Planned Obsolescence the TV installation combines outdated technology with stencil art and reminds me somehow on one of these old-school electro clubs in Berlin… However, I liked it, especially because it again shows the diversity of Boa Mistura, who want to represent a mixture of perspectives which complement, influence and mix themselves together in order to create something better. (about Boa Mistura). ...

Park(ing) Day is an annual, worldwide event that invites citizens everywhere to transform metered parking spots into temporary parks for the public good. This year’s Parking Day will take place - as I just read on Urbanshit - tomorrow, September 16th! That means, that you all have to take your camp-chairs, some turf, and probably some barbecue equipment to reclaim the streets and public space by reusing parking bays… Since 2005, Park(ing) Day has grown rapidly. The 2010 event included more than 800 Park installations in more than 180 cities on six continents. From Iran to Madagascar, Venezuela to South Korea, the project continues to expand to urban centers across the globe, and participants have broadened the scope of PARK installations to fulfill a range of unmet social needs. ...

I recently received a nice e-mail by French street artist Chifumi, who asked me to share his giant wheatpaste artworks with you - and because I was impressed when I saw photos of his works I immediately started to write this post… Based in Mulhouse near the German-French border, Chifumi not just creates fantastic urban hacking interventions (like those in Strasbourg and Avignon) and amazing architectural landscape installations (like those in various French forests), but also giant wheatpastes talking about violent aesthetics of graffiti, which somehow reminded me of the tape hands by Buff Diss… ...

Using simplest materials to create complex ephemeral architectures German urban artist Clemens Behr is probably a new star in the world of abstract urban art. In June, he went on an excursion to New York City to create several uncommissioned public installations in East Village, China Town, Soho and Brooklyn… I really like this stuff for two reasons: First, using simple materials like cardboard, tape or paper to create impressing artworks is just great. Second, his abstract installations break up the usual city architecture and the urban every-day landscape! ...