Painting Walls: Graffiti, Street Art & Urban Art

One of my personal heroes, Portuguese-born artist Pedro Matos is going to exhibit at Ivory & Black this April! The show, simply entitled Heritage is Pedro’s first solo-show in London and features new, monochromatic oil paintings by the artist, who became famous with those awesome graffiti-inspired portray-paintings… Pedro Matos’ paintings feature a rich and complex layering consisting of different languages of painting, which combine texture, patterns, realistic figurative painting and text. Through this visual language, his work draws the viewer into a dialog surrounding the impermanence of social and cultural values. Inspired by the french philosopher Michel Foucault’s work, subject to his paintings and explorations are the themes/concepts of Knowledge, Power, History, Sexuality, Discourse, Episteme and Impermanence. The exhibition will also comprise the release of a limited edition artist’s book of Pedro Matos’ work and life. (Ivory & Black) ...

London-based bright art star Conor Harrington is not just cover hero of the latest Very Nearly Almost (VNA) magazine (here some insights into the issue before..) but is also running his Dead Meat show at Lazarides Gallery till the 14th of April. I was hanging around Conor’’s studio during the making of his latest show at Lazarides in London, here’s some exclusive snaps! (Viktor Vauthier) Photographer Viktor Vauthier just published some behind the scenes photos of great dressed boys and naked girls being artist’s models for some of Harrington’s latest paintings. Looks quite great, like a medieval role play game and is probably an amazing inspiration source for Conor… ...

The massive paint attack which took place two years ago at Rosenthaler Platz in Berlin, was one of the most impressing urban art interventions I’ve seen so far in town. Organized and executed by Dutch performance artist Iepe Rubingh and his team, the so-called Painting Reality project recently was the force behind a similar paint attack in Sao Paulo… Painting Reality in Brazil As a part of the Baixo Centro Festival which took place during the last week in Brazil’s biggest metropolis, a group of activists tipped out several buckets of colorful paint on a much used junction and started in that way the great process of an urban live painting, using cars, bikes and pedestrians as brushes, spreading the paint all over the streets! Again it’s just amazing to see how easily you can color your city and have a lot of fun. ...

Next month, the popular Berlin-based Quintessenz Creation crew (remember their great stop-motion videos True Colors or Color my Kingdom?) and well-known painter Danny Doom (here some shots of his latest show) will together have an exhibition at OZM Gallery Hamburg, presenting amazing collaboration artworks, bringing together the colorful, comic-like characters by Doom and the style-diversity and print-affinity of Quintessenz… Their both foibles for experimental works, breaking borders of plain canvas paintings and their graffiti backgrounds are superb preconditions for an exciting show with striking artworks of different size and medium. I’m really looking forward to this show and will try to come to Hamburg for the opening, as they’re not just great artists but also good friends of mine! ...

Punk, skate and graffiti influences versus cute ninja rabbits, foxes and other illustrative characters - that’s the wild mix content of the Danny Doom vs. Flamat exhibition which opened its doors last Friday at Neonchocolate Gallery in Berlin, presenting culture clashing artworks by urban artist Danny Doom from Berlin and by Leipzig-based illustrator Flamat! As some voices revealed, this art-show is the first part of a more complex art tour by Danny Doom (e.g. including the so-called living-room art tour) who is going to celebrate this last doomed year 2012 (just remember the Maya calendar!) with several different art events taking place probably around the world. ...

About 2500 old NYC subway cars, including 1000 so-called Redbirds, have been buried about 80 feet underwater off the US east coast during the last years, as the Spiegel recently published! After running round about 40 years in one of the world’s largest subway networks, this is their last stop… Redbirds - Anti-Graffiti Subway The Redbirds, which are named after their cinnabar red anti-graffiti coat of paint and got famous during the early 1980th, when New York Cities graffiti scene reached the peak, are now helping to create an artificial reef off the coast of Delaware (named Redbirds Reef), what sounds really weird in my ears… ...

I just fell from my chair. Toronto-born, Tokyo-based entrepreneur, occasional artist and almost architect Christian Forestell (here a short interview) is right away starting the world’s largest painting project entitled Bikini Lines to benefit children orphaned in the 2011 Fukushima disaster! Bikini Lines - The Cactus Dome Painting Bikini Lines is a proposed massive, mixed media project inspired by a lack of standardized nuclear disaster reporting, in particular the panic that set in over Tokyo following the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and subsequent meltdown. Based on crowd-funding, the project’s main focus is on painting the huge Cactus Dome on the Marshall Islands, an enormous, foot-and-a-half-thick, 107m wide dome consisting of 358 gigantic concrete panels built over a nuclear crater, seriously! ...

The marvelous paintings and illustrations by graffiti-inspired Danish artist Jakob Tolstrup describe his worldview in the humorous way of someone who was born in the middle of nowhere - the countryside of Denmark. During the last couple of years, Jakob not just pushed his amazing painting series forward, experimenting with different techniques, materials and mediums, but also worked together with different galleries and invoiced several papers and magazines for his illustration works. ...

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… ...

Berlin-based Quintessenz Creation crew is at least well-known in Germany for their spectacular stop motion videos showing color in motion and other urban art, especially when it’s about the power of true color! During this year’s IBUg street art festival the crew produced a new stop motion film, which went online just a few minutes ago! This time it’s a mix of stop motion and live sequences… Quintessenz is an artists collective based on a core group of former students from Hildesheim, Germany who founded the crew back in 2007. With the help of their films, they try to discover the power of color in abandoned areas and to analyze the effect of color on the environment what leads them to new, impressing paint-experiments…as you can see again is this new film! Thumbs up. ...