Urban Sculptures: Street Art & Beyond

This archive dives deep into the world of sculpture within the urban landscape. We explore everything from monumental public art pieces to smaller, more intimate works integrated into street art scenes. Discover the diverse materials, techniques, and powerful messages conveyed through these three-dimensional works. See how artists transform everyday environments into captivating galleries, challenging perceptions and sparking conversations. Explore the history, the artists, and the evolving impact of sculpture within the dynamic context of street and urban art.

Bosso Fataka - Cling Wrap Sculptures

Bosso Fataka, that is a group of four Berlin-based artists, being well-known in town for using cling wrap as adhesive to turn trash into sculptures in public spaces. Recently, the world’s largest international multimedia news agency Reuters did a nice video feature on them, entitled Berlin artists turn trash into sculpture… Their pieces remain no longer than a couple of weeks, until municipal workers remove them, leaving photographs on their Facebook page as the sole documentation of their activity. ...

Part2ism’s Abstract Horizons

This Thursday, one of the UK’s original contemporary street art pioneers Keith Hopewell aka Part2ism is going to open his first solo exhibition since 2009! The New Horizons & Future Love Songs show, hosted by Red Gallery in London, will feature new abstract paintings as well as sculptural pieces and is definitely a must to see for every abstract graffiti enthusiast… A syncretist at heart and now a synaesthesiac in practice, Part2ism is a multi-talented creator, exploring where his interests and instincts lead him. Beyond all the isms’ that can be applied to his work over the past twenty eight years, whether of his own invention or culled from art history, Part2ism has always aligned himself with his own visions first. As an artist, he subsumes all categories and at the same time defies them. More importantly than these post-creation categories that can be applied to his body of work, the underlying and unifying threads in Part2ism’s history are DIY individualism, a revolutionary mentality and a consistent exploration of mind-challenging aesthetics. His timbre, his voice, his style is a constantly mutating, gene-splicing hybridism embodying rebellion and progression. ...

Yarn-Bombed Albert Einstein

Remember the yarn-bombed Wall Street Bull? Now, Polish street artist Olek struck again when she covered the almost 9 meters tall memorial statue of Albert Einstein at the National Academy of Science in Washington DC! Unfortunately, the city cleaned the yarn-bombed Einstein within hours… Olek says Einstein, for her, was an easy choice since he was such a creative thinker himself. “I thought he might have a sense of humor about it,” she says. […] Presumably this kind of thing is par for the course when you’re a guerrilla yarn-bomber. (Washingtonian) ...

Berlin Subway Sculpture

Popular urban artist Clemens Behr and graphic designer Raby Florence Fofana teamed up not long ago and together created a subway sculpture for Berlin’s probably most famous subway line U1! The so-called U1 Objekt is a two meters tall sculpture on wheels built out of wood and aluminium plates. The plates have been screenprinted with pattern-designs by Raby which where afterwards arranged and screwed together by Clemens… This Berlin subway sculpture is not just adding another part to Clemens Behr’s Places and Spaces series, but also objectifies the look and feel of a well-known means of local transport. Great! ...

Sand Graffiti: DAIM on the Beach

Famous German 3D graffiti artist Mirko Reisser aka DAIM, who is well-known also from posters and TV, just spent a day at a beach. Probably because the sun was long in coming, DAIM started to build his version of a proper drip castle - a sand graffiti showing his name in his well-known three-dimensional style… On his own admission, it took him 6 hours to build this great, but still somehow unsteady letter sculpture. Whereas it just took 30 minutes for the sea to destroy it again. For that reason, you maybe could call this result of a graffiti maestro playing at the beach a temporary sand graffiti installation or just an urban sandcastle! ...

Guerrilla Paint Sculpture

Looks like companies are going a step further with their urban art ad campaigns. After using stencils for guerrilla advertising, paying graffiti artists to paint some backdrops or planning large action street theater, they are now willing to let their ad agencies install impressing advert sculptures… Belgian paint manufacturer Levis (Akzo Nobel) recently came up with an urban guerrilla paint sculpture! The installation, planned and created by Belgian ad agency King George, consists of an XXL Levis paint pot mounted onto an existing lamppost eight metres above the ground so it appears to be floating. The post itself has been painted red, creating a stream of paint that looks like it is coloring the car park where it is situated, as was described on designboom.com. ...

Street Sculptures: Ronzo installs Birdz in London!

Well-known London-based urban artist Ronzo just started to put up his Birdz street sculptures series on the streets of London! Ronzo, who not just created London’s unofficial mascot - the Credit Crunch Monster - but also installed several other street sculptures, is a constant cornerstone of the British street art scene. Hence, he was featured in the latest Very Nearly Almost (VNA) magazine… Personally, I couldn’t just go out and paint walls with the same tag or words every night. ...

A Master of the Third Dimension: Mare139’s Metal Wildstyle Graffiti

Yesterday, I had the chance to revisit the jaw-dropping metal wildstyle sculptures of Mare139 — and let me tell you, I was completely blown away. For those not already in the know, Mare139 (aka Carlos Mare Rodríguez) is a name that resonates with graffiti writers and street art lovers around the world. While many contemporary street artists are just beginning to dip their toes into the fine art world, Mare139 has been bridging the gap between graffiti and high art since the early 1980s. Not only is he celebrated for his iconic B-boy series, but his groundbreaking 3D graffiti sculptures have set the gold standard for graffiti as sculptural art. ...

Beaufort04: Waiting for Climate Change

There’s strange things happening at the Flemish coast. This weekend, the open air art festival Beaufort04 started, transforming the Belgian coast into an enormous space for contemporary art in the public landscape. Various contemporary artist like Wim Delvoye, Ai Wei Wei and Anthony Gormley already produced their series of work during the first three editions, now it’s time for others to do the same… Isaac Cordal for example is creating a body of work called Waiting for Climate Change, consisting of several of his well-known sculptures and installations that will be exhibited on the beach of De Panne as well as in a local historic villa. In my eyes, having all these small figures in a publicly accessible area and discussing climate change at the beach is quite an interesting approach. It’s a perfect scenario for Isaac’s works! ...

Mark Jenkins Exhibition in Berlin

As I already told you, the first Mark Jenkins exhibition opened its doors yesterday presented by Gestalten! The famous street sculptor showed not just photos of his popular works, but also included new Jenkins sculptures made in Berlin. Furthermore, Gestalten used the artist’s Berlin residence to publish his first monograph The Urban Theater: Mark Jenkins. In addition to Mark Jenkins’s sculptural work, Glazed Paradise includes photographs of select installations that reveal how compelling the interaction between his artwork and its environment can be. (Gestalten) ...