Art Installations: Urban Interventions & Public Space

After the first edition of Tag’n’Tof, a participatory urban art installation project, last year the second edition took recently place at Confluence Gallery in Paris. As a part of the Give Me A Wall So I Can Escape festival, the French PhotoGraff Collectif (PGC) invited 100 graffiti artists to paint a paper graffiti city! For that reason, well-known graffiti artists like Saner, Sowat, Shaka, Sly2, MTO and others were able to paint the recreated streets of Belleville. The result, a massive paper and cardboard installation city looks just great… ...

Recreation or reinterpretation are as well as letters in graffiti integral components of street art, but it’s not usual to create an entire installation by just being inspired by a single painting… French street artists Žilda and Rö recently reinterpreted L’assassinat de Marat (The Assassination of Marat), a painting by Jean-Joseph Weerts, by creating a astonishing mixed-media installation somewhere in Rennes! Combining wooden objects, paste-ups and fog, the successful collaboration created a somehow scary atmosphere… ...

Ronzo’s Credit Crunch Monster, the unofficial mascot of London’s Great Eastern Street and a well-known eye-catcher next to Shoreditch High Street station, had recently to move to another spot! The monument, which was installed in 2009, can now be found on top of one of the UK’s most famous breweries, the old Truman Brewery, at Brick Lane! The time had come to put a face to the terrifying credit crunch menace. Please welcome Crunchy, the official mascot of the global financial meltdown. (Ronzo in 2009) ...

I’m pretty sure you already heard about the new installation famous German urban art duo Herakut recently created in Newcastle, but have you also watched the nice interview they did with OneThirty3? Invited by famous UK-based artist Hush, Hera and Akut painted an entire room in not more than three and a half day. The clue, the room has been open for the public just for one evening earlier this month! ...

Because I had a lot to do for university this week I didn’t had that much time to write. Nevertheless I collected some interesting urban art news during the last days, which is why I’m able to give you an more or less detailed overview about what happened on the streets around the world. Here’s what I wasn’t posting about while I was busy writing scientific papers for different professors… ...

Famous for his large-scale depictions of animals on city walls around the world, Belgian urban artist Roa brings the creatures which inhabit the fringes of human society back to the metropolis. Recently Skalitzers Gallery opened its doors for his first solo-exhibition in Berlin, including again brilliant paintings, sketches and drawings of animals in his unique style… Of course I joined the opening ceremony, chatted with the man of the day, took some photos for those of you who can’t make it to visit the show and had some first insights into Roa’s first limited edition book Roa: An Introduction To Animal Representation by Mammal Press (Photos of the book will follow - I just can say it’s simply great!). Other good news is, that he will add some new animal murals to Berlin’s streets in the next days, be curious! ...

Graffiti artists upgrade their tools: Berlin-based graffiti and intervention artist DTagno just came up with a crazy train graffiti installation, what he calls Morphogenetic Field Device… The device consists of a solid metal frame and several spray-cans, which can be triggered all together at the same time via a single metal bar. Although the recently published video documentary is a bit long-winded, it demonstrates the workings of this unique graffiti tool quite well. ...

I just stumbled upon new artworks by Italian street artist Teo Pirisi aka Moneyless from Strasbourg and have to say that I like his experimental street installations. Moneyless creates the next level of what the Spanish La Pluma Eléctri*k street art crew calls Spider Tags: Two and three dimensional abstract installations made of cotton threads combined with geometrically paintings. The results are often impressing, especially when the installations look like wafting through the air… ...

One year after those great Apple iPad ad-bustings in Berlin, the trendy computer giant is going to open a flagship-store in Hamburg. That’s nothing special - I mean nowadays there are Apple stores everywhere - but it’s a super moment for a nice and funny guerrilla art installation! And that’s what also the Hamburg-based intervention art group .WAV (what stands for We Are Visual) thought when they recently installed a big and colorful Microsoft Windows logo right at the construction area of the new Apple flagship-store! ...

I just noticed, that French urban artist and master of rectangular shaped calligraphy and geometrically forms L’Atlas (who was recently in Berlin!) created a new public installation in March at the Place du Palais-Royal in Paris! Using 2722 cartons he and some assistants spent one day to build (and destroy) one of his well-known geometrically signs in 3D. I really like this work and think that this is again a good example for the diversity of L’Atlas! Watching the video (which is a stop-motion film containing 2754 photos) I tried to imagine what all the tourists around thought is going on…