Street Art Prints: Urban Canvas Reimagined

Almost a year ago, French photographer, street artist and TED Prize winner JR started his Inside Out project and since then, the large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic works went worldwide! Whether in Haiti, Brazil, Greece, Israel, or Mexico, people are participating and paste their faces in the streets of their cities. Now it was time to look back and summarize the first year of turning the world inside out… ...

Famed Alex Diamond is well-known but still a nobody. The artist’s artworks are popular but there’s no corresponding face, neither a determined gender. Short, Alex Diamond is a ghost without identity… The Alex Diamond Mining Company was not just the name of the Alex Diamond exhibition in Hamburg back in 2011, it also is the latest chapter in the unusual story of Alex Diamond, an artistic project that has been evading the definition of a fixed personality behind the pictures since its beginnings in 2004. And it is the title of Alex Diamond’s latest book, documenting on around 90 colored, German and English labeled pages the diversity of created artworks, reaching from woodcuts and prints to installations, mixed media projects and photography! ...

Compiled and written by old school UK writer Robert Whitelock aka Cute, the Monokrome book on 224 pages includes world class black and white graffiti designs by some of the major graffiti writers from around the world, including Nash & Does, Remi Rough, Hush, Asker, Itch, Inkfetish, Killer Gerbil, Denz, Kofie, Inkie, System and many more! Furthermore, Monokrome presents blackbook works from 31 featured artists and interviews with all of them and shows the talents of a mixture of worldwide artists with many different styles, and quotes from a handful of writers. And although it reminds me somehow on the urban illustration book Schwarz auf Weiss - Style needs no Color, the first impressions I got via the flip through below were all in all just positive. ...

Amateur Magazine - Smash137 After number 6 and 7 as well as 8 and 9, recently the 10th issue of Switzerland-born Amateur Magazine was published and surprised me again… To publish the first double-digit issue is a good reason to party for every mag, especially when it’s released just twice a year. Nevertheless, it seems that in the case of Amateur, the team didn’t party before the release but tried to produce the best issue ever - and in my eyes, this totally worked out! ...

Old-school ways of printing, like screen printing, are currently re-experiencing another revival with artists, using those very technical and manually adjustable proceedings to create limited print editions with a rough and sometimes vintage style… Regarding Paul Collier, another of these revival experiencing printing techniques is letterpress printing. When I stumbled upon the nice and intimate Upside Down, Left to Right letterpress film by Danny Cooke, I immediately felt like a small kid watching his grand-dad working! I’m a big letterpress fan, mainly because of that certain feeling you have by stroking the printed surface and the knowledge of how difficult creating good letterpress prints can be, for what reason I really loved this short film. ...

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! ...

I have a foible for maps in general - you should know that since I posted about the map cuts by Karen O’Leary or the worldwide subway map source - for what reason I was delighted when I recently found the transamerican map artworks by Matthew Cusick. Matthew creates mainly portraits by cutting and pasting together snippets of physical maps! The results look just great and I’m really wondering how many maps he already utilized… ...

End of last month, The Alex Diamond Mining Company exhibition opened at Vicious Gallery in Hamburg, presenting new artworks, like woodcut prints and installations, by Alex Diamond! Because I’m a fan of Diamond’s genderless, ageless and nation-less characters, I really enjoyed the superb photos Jo Fischer took during the opening and the nice video, documenting the creation process of the woodcuts… I’m pretty sure it’s worth to go and visit the still running exhibition, before it closes september 17th! For more info, visit viciousgallery.com. ...

It’s time for some more urban art link-tips today! This time I got some great new urbanism footage, a DIY paper toy guide, news about my Urban Artists in Action photo-series and more interesting street art and graffiti news from around the world. Here we go… For a few days, some selected pieces of my Urban Artists in Action photo-series are available as art prints via society6! Some more are going to be available soon - I would be pleased with your support… ...

Melbourne-based artist Robbie Rowlands seems to be obsessed by cutting through things, e.g. rooms, trees, houses, chairs, walls, further things and other stuff. The Australian explores notions of stability and vulnerability through the manipulation of objects and environments as Amir knows to report… The artist takes spaces and objects and shapes them in a form that makes them almost unrecognizable, and of course there is certain violence, an element of destructiveness in the process. But the effect is productive. (about Robbie Rowlands) ...