Streetart in...

… Rio de Janeiro!

In March 2009, the Brazilian government passed a law which decriminalizes street art. In an amendment to a federal law that punishes the defacing of urban buildings or monuments, street art was made legal if done with the consent of the owners. 

So any owner who wanted to get a new style for his or her house is allowed to ask any street artist he wants to paint a owned wall. 

As progressive of a policy as this may sound, the legislation is actually a reflection of the evolving landscape in Brazilian street art, an emerging and divergent movement in the global street art landscape. 

In Brazil, there is a distinction made between tagging, known as pichação, and grafite, a street art style distinctive to Brazil. 

In 1999, there was a progressive policy project called “Não pixe, grafite”, meant that 35 graffiti artists came together to bring diversity to Rio's style. 

The unique thing about the graffiti in Rio is their style. Fluent blurred lines between formal and informal, always on the limit between legal and illegal. 

Legalizing this kind of art makes Rio even more different, authentic, and more alive. 

Graffiti are also defined by their conspicuous South American style. Graffiti exist everywhere. They can be found everywhere, from the favelas to Brazil's upper class neighbourhoods, from residential to institutional. Streets, museums, tourist attractions, everything is used for art. If the owner allows.

Bombing

Bombing

-> Underground-Bombing

-> Train-Bombing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6IYk91AEE0

Like in the movie was said Bombing is a fast, on quantity based, illegal graffiti.

For the sprayers it’s important that it is illegal, because if it wouldn’t, it could be done by everyone.

Also Spraying is more important for them than the rules they break.

A very famous bomber-crew is Moses and Taps

3Steps

3Steps

3Steps is the German artist's group of the twins Kai Krieger and Uwe Krieger as well as Joachim Pitt from Giessen. 3steps lives and works in the university town Giessen in hessen. 3Steps was founded in autumn, 1998. From the classical graffiti of the New York Stylewriting her style developed out fast to large-size wall stories. Since the middle of the year 2000 their works are found on the whole globe, from Giessen over Munich and Berlin to London, Milano, Venice, L. A. and New York. In November, 2014 they were distinguished by the Federal Government for their art with the title “Kultur- und Kreativpiloten Deutschland”

Their conceptual pictures were influenced from their trips since 2007 more and more from classical graffiti art and Street art to an urbane pop art collage. Besides, characters and her stories take a central role, but classical graffiti elements and graphic patterns are still creation elements.

The work of 3steps has his origin in the Mural and Street art. The today's style of 3steps contains influence of Street art as well as elements of the Style-Writing, the photo realism, the pressure graphics and the pop kind. Big reflexion of the today's world which is marked by varying kind from reality, fiction, media and desirable worlds picks out as a central theme of 3steps. The group expresses this by colour-intensive picture worlds.

A central object of the works of 3steps are motives of the daily life which tell a special story to the viewer.  strong and intensive colours as well as clear patterns should express the urban glamour.

As a basis of the works serve own portraits and fashion photographs as well as views of architecture of urbane town sceneries. On this occasion, 3steps take up the impressions which they have held on their trips through the urbane metropolises in Europe and America.

The port folio of 3steps encloses works of large-size Mural kind about Street kind, to paintings on wood and canvas, photographs and  things up to installations.

You can easily go to Giessen and buy a picture from them on canvas.

Streetart in...

... Berlin!

In no other town you can find such a variety in street art like in Berlin. The success of the streets art shows that you can succeed by art to reshape the image of a town. 

The tourists who come every day to the capital are not pulled along ago any more only by the places of interest, bars and clubs, but also the art which can be found there on the streets. 

The UNESCO called Berlin ‘town of design’. Berlin is one of the biggest art galleries of the world.

Artists from all over the world come to be realised in this town and to form a part of the artistic scenes. 

Berlin offers for artists whether young or old, an amount of clearance and promises above all inspiration. Everybody can find his place in Berlin, 

because this town simply offers everything what the artist heart desires, mainstream or an illegal action.

Who wants to see art in Berlin, but got no money for museums and galleries, you should not search only on the streets of Berlin, 

big treasures are often found behind fences and walls in old buildings.

Berlin is international, you can feel this quite clearly if you look at the works of the artists from all over the world. Especially at the East Side Gallery.

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Martin Ron

Martin Ron

Martin Ron, born in 1981 is a painter and muralist from Caseros in the Privince of Buenos Aires, Argentine.

From a young age Martin became immersed in the visual arts and attending classes of painting, drawing, comics and sculpture until he found his vocation – painting murals and street art.

His artworks, often described as “urban surrealism”, stand out for their visual impact and big size. The characteristica of his work is an incredible use of the technique of hyper-realism combined with elements of fantasy to create unique compositions on walls and buildings. Martin paints impossible situations that give the impression of happening in real life (realism).

There’s a stunning mural of Martin Ron in Buenos Aires. It features a giant turtle flying out of a hole in the wall and an old man and his dog . The title of the mural is ‘Pedro Luján and his Dog’. Martin told Buenos Aires Street Art about its meaning and what the images represent: “Using a marine turtle was ideal because it has the characteristics that I needed to achieve the effect of 3-D,” said Martin. “The turtle is beautiful animal and has a lot of colours and textures. It’s really interesting to paint. It’s not an animal that is seen a lot and it seemed ideal to take it out of its normal context and put on it on the walls of Barracas.”

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Writing

Writing

Writing is actually just another style underneath the big headline of
‘Graffiti’. In most parts of the scene, it’s not respected, mainly
because of the huge amount of laymen doing this.

Writing alphabets on Google, for demonstrating the foreseeability and strict rules of Writing

“Years ago every Writing had a kind of personal flavour. Nowadays we fastidiously fulfill established style-rules.” 

Motivation:

• self-expression
• limit experiences during the creation (fear, police, etc.)
• fame
• positive emotions (stress relief, relaxation, etc.)
• aspiration after achieving progress

Blu

Blu

Main information: not given.

Blu is an Italian graffiti/streetart artist born in the 1980s in
Senigallia. His actual home is in Bologna, but that’s everything that is known about his person in detail.

Graffiti by Blu on a wall in Campobasso-Molise-Italia, showing the ‘career’ of a soldier…

• he is one of the most famous artists in the mural scene
• his style is global and designed for social criticism
• back in the 90’s the big graffiti boom in Italy left its mark on Blu -> nowadays, his art has changed from graffiti style to real street art style, even if his technique shows his roots
• comic styled and surreal motives are dominating his work
• his preferred colour is white (it shines brighter during night)
• most of his graffiti are in Italy

Murals

Murals

Murals is a far-reaching term: Murals are all pieces of artwork painted or applied directly on a wall, ceiling or other large permanent surface. 

Mostly architectural elements of the given space are incorporated into the picture. 

Murals already exist for a long time e.g. there are many ancient murals which have survived in Egyptian tombs (around 3150 BC). 

The best-known kind of mural is probably the fresco. 

Murals today are painted in many ways such as trompe l'oiel (eng.: 'fool' or 'trick the eye').

Nowadays the beauty of a wall mural has become more popular involving many techniques:

• In order to create a wall you first have to clean the wall. 

• Priming the wall as the next step is a is an important because the primer will help the paint to stick to the wall more easily

•  Afterwards you transfer your picture onto the wall. 

You have two methods you can use to enlarge your picture:

The Grid method comprises drawing a grid over your reference photo and then drawing a grid of equal ratio on your work surface (paper, canvas, wooden panel, etc.). 

Then you draw the image on your canvas where you focus on one square at a time, until the entire image has been transferred. 

Then you simply erase or paint over the grid lines and start working on your painting, which will now be in perfect proportion. 

You can also use an art projector which is a handy tool for artists of all skill levels. 

Photo realistic painters normally use a projector to enlarge and transfer the image from a small photo onto a large canvas. For filling in the lines you also use different techniques such as sponging (this creates a sense of texture in a mural so that clouds look pretty realistic), stippling, stencilling and glazing. 

The final step to finish your painted wall mural is to seal it which means applying an isolation coat and a varnish and using a clear, non-yellowing varnish in a matte or satin sheen.

The aim of murals is pretty obvious: They are supposed to draw attention to certain things/political issues. So murals are often used for advertising purposes. 

They also upgrade boring looking cities and create a more sophisticated form of graffiti.

Martin Watson

Martin Watson

Martin Watson, born in 1984, is a young Norwegian artist who bases his oeuvre on stencil art. He studied art and graphic design at Westerdals School of Communication in Oslo where he discovered stencil art and the urban art scene.

After tracing graffiti and its development, he started his own stencil production about 11 years ago in the winter of 2004. Inspired by artists like José Parla and Cy Twombly, his art becomes a mixture of graffiti and stencil.

He gets inspired by people, city landscapes, old buildings, graffiti and derelict walls. His interest in decay helped to develop his style, motives and composition. 

Martin Watson enjoys creating a unity of contrasts between materials, backgrounds, motives and human intervention. He uses grey tones as a basis but he adds vibrant colours to break the monochrome concrete expression and bring a splash of life to his motives. 

Nowadays he has had several shows in metropolises all over the world, like Paris, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles and New York.

http://martinwhatson.com/outside/

#prayforparis

http://martinwhatson.com/inside/

Streetart in ...

... Los Angeles!

Three years ago, Los Angeles lifted the ban on public murals. Previously, in the 1960s and ’70s, the “mural capital of the world” hadn’t had a public mural scene due to the law. Now, a group of young Latino muralists is chasing after a mural renaissance. That might be one of the first big steps towards Los Angeles' bright future of street art. Laws that will be passed and bans that will be lifted do not only open new opportunities, they also boost the development of entire scenes.

As a nice example is a mural painted by Kristy Sandoval. She turned a barred window into an opened cage with parrots and butterflies. She said that her mural art is a kind of feminist activism. The owner of the house wanted her to paint a black woman, that shows how people's minds work there.

Political graffiti

Political graffiti

Graffiti is a passion. The street artists paint what comes in their mind. As a consequence the people started to create political graffiti that often criticize the government. Typical topics of political graffiti’s are: ideology, religion, anti-Semitism, racism, discrimination against minorities like homosexual people. Moreover the graffiti’s are an expression of fury against the police and political power relations (especially in illiberal and totalitarian systems). 
Political graffiti also represent slogans and symbols. Furthermore they are mostly artistically modest because they are just conducive to the anonymous depiction of the artist’s opinion.
In order to get a large number of recipients, political graffiti’s are painted on well-frequented and clearly visible places. A typical example is the Tahrir Square in Cairo during the Arab Spring in 2011.
You can find political graffiti all over the world; for example in Northern Ireland or Basque country but also in metropolises like Los Angeles and especially in Lisbon. At this places you can also find elaborate political murals.

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Alsasua (northern Spain) – you can see a political graffiti with an axe that is entwined by a snake. This symbol is the logo of the Basque underground organization ETA. The organization killed two officials of the Guardia Civil by a bomb attack in the Mallorquin bathing place Palmanova in 2009. 

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Here you can see one of the most famous political graffiti’s that shows Breschnew (on the left) and Honecker (on the right) kissing each other. This graffiti was painted on the Berlin wall and it criticizes the system of the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union. 

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A modern, political graffiti that criticizes Putin and the government in Russia.

Magda Sayeg

Magda Sayeg

Magda Sayeg is considered to be the mother of Yarn bombing, which is also known as urban knitting, but actually she’s a textile artist in Austin, Texas.

One day she wrapped the door handle of her store because she thought that it looks boring and she wanted to make it more colourful. People passed by, stopped because it was something new and they liked it. So this was the birth of urban knitting.  

Crochet covered bus in Mexico

Covered parking meters

Magda describes her work that way: „My passion is with the material: I love displacing handmade, mostly knitted, material in environments where it seemingly doesn’t belong… only to discover that they can coexist quite harmoniously. The exploration of environmental change drives me: provoking the world to be a more challenging, unconventional, and interesting place."

Route Master Double Decker bus in London

                               

Nowadays she’s a member of the group Knitta Please (short form: Knitta). With the help of them, the highlights of her early work include the knitting covered bus in Mexico City, as well as a solo exhibition in Rome at “La Museo des esposizione”, where she explored the usage of lighting with knitted material.

Today she’s doing leading community-based projects like covering parking meters or she’s working on commissions around the world with brands like 7UP, Gap or Mini Cooper.

Knitted Gun in Sweden

                              

         

Vhils

Vhils

His real name is Alexandre Farto, he was born on the first of January in 1987 in Lissabon, that for he´s an portuguesen Street-Artist. Now he´s living in Seixal and normally he works as an Illustratior, graphic artist, for advertising agencies or video animation. His Streetart career started already with 13 years with spraying Graffitis, but in order to reach a bigger number of inhabitants of his city he began to try also other methods of streetart. 

Today he mainly focuses on scratching, revising advertising or explosive Streetart, which means he busts his motives into the wall. To process his material, which insists of stone, wood, cork, etc., he uses drills, air hammers, acid or even dynamite.

Since Vhils took part at the cans-festival 2008 in London, organized by Banksy, which is a big streetart-festival, he belongs to the most popular streetartists in Europe, because in London his art caused a big sensation. Since then he took part at a lot of streetart festivals in many different countries so now his art can be seen almost all over the world, on the street or in museums.  

Vhils uses the principe of vandalism to create something new. By destroying a wall with dynamite or a drill he creates enormous pictures. That´s his way to express himself.

Streetpainting

Streetpainting

Streetpainting is normally done with chalk or brushes on streets, that´s why it isn´t lasting very long. The weather is the streetpaintings „natural death“, because when it starts to rain, all the chalk gets washed away. Normally the artists get financed by passerbys that give them some money, bigger projects sometimes also get sponsored by companies.

The story of streetpainting isn´t known very well, but what´s sure is that it passes back to the 15 century. Probably in Italy they painted religious representatons, mainly pictures of the virgin mary on the streets. That´s why streetpainters in Italy are still called Madonnari, because of the italian word „Madonna“ for the Virgin Mary.

A modern and very popular way of streetpainting represents 3D-Steetart. The pictures Drawn on the Street are blurred, so you can just see the 3D-effect at a special fix point. The biggest 3D-Streetpainting worldwide, which is also a guiennes world record, was drawn by 3D Joe and Max in London and it is 1160 m^2 big and got financed by Rebok. 

Urban knitting

Urban Knitting

Urban Knitting is also known as Guerilla Knitting, Radical Stitching, Yarn bombing or Knit Graffiti, but it’s mainly called Urban or Guerilla Knitting.

The word Urban Knitting is a composition of the Spanish word “guerrilla”, which means “little war” and the word knitting. So the term itself also gives a hint on the intention of this type of street art.  War always includes the wish to change something and it’s called little war because compared to other forms of street art like graffiti, it’s not that aggressive and quite smooth.

The most important advantages according to this form of art are that Urban Knitting is non-permanent, so it can be easily removed if it’s necessary and knitting is also simple to learn and to produce. Never the less, the practice is still illegal.

Guerilla Knitters mainly want to beautify public places and it’s also about reclaiming and personalizing sterile or cold public locations. Sometimes their works can contain a symbolic meaning, a political expression or they want to cause irritation in order to make people think about it.

A great example for Urban Knittings with a political expression is the “pink m 24 chaffee” by Marianne Jorgensen.  It shows a real life combat tank from the Second Worldwar. By covering the tank with about 79m² of pink wool, she wants to provoke and to protest against the war in Iraq.

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In regard to history, the practice is believed to have originated in the US with knitters in Texas who tried to find a creative way to use their leftover and unfinished knitting projects. But actually the start of this movement has been attributed to the 37 year old Magda Sayeg. Since this time Urban knitting has developed with knitting and crocheting groups worldwide, especially in America, England and Spain.

Furthermore, Joann Matvichuk found the International Yarnbombing Day, which is since then celebrated every year. There are also several books about this type of street art, like “Yarnbombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti, a self published catalogue of an exhibition held at the 18 ^th street arts complex in Santa Monica and even series like “2 broke girls” and “Rote Rosen” feature Urban Knitting.

Various and Gold

Various and Gold

The artist duo Various & Gould from Berlin has been working in close collaboration since 2005. Both share the love for paper, enthusiasm for accidental beauty in everyday life and urban art. Collaborations with friends and the work in public form the basis for their common creating.

Various and Gould deal with social themes such as work, migration, identity, death and the current financial crisis, in a playful and humorous way.

Both prefer methods like silk-screen printing, collage and poster, but recently they begun experimenting with public performance and installations.

After their study in the academy of art in Berlin (KHB) in Weißensee both made their degree in 2010.

The duo's first large mural can be found in Berlin. It reflects their love for collages and screen-printing. The image is part of their same-titled series “Face Time“ which subverts the idea of portraits in a traditional sense and plays with fictional patchwork identities.

Additionally the Berlin artists temporarily installed a so-called “WitchHunt“ in various cities. This witch-hunt should not be understood as a chase, but rather as an interactive scavenger hunt, in which you seek their portrait-posters of fascinating people. The paste-ups are equipped with QR-codes. Through texts and audio tracks you can find out where the next poster is located and learn more about these people. For this printings a particular color was used that allows the ignition of matches on the artworks.

An other project was the Marionette “Heinrich” in June 2012. The urban-artists installed a life-size marionette beneath the Görlitzer Bahnhof in Berlin.

One of their most famous project is the “modern saints” poster series. They created different saints each of them for one relevant and social problem. They pick issues like globalization, climate change, financial crisis and torture out as a central theme.

In summer, 2013 Various and Gould led the Kunstworkshop “Street meets art“ for Teenagers. The motto was: “the wall is the game!”

Go visit their official homepage if you're interested in finding out more about them!