Oli-B’s Beautiful Shapeshifting Abstract Street Art

May 17, 2013 by Amir

Oli-b street art

When Brussels, Belgium based street artist Oli-B isn’t busy creating his fluid abstractions on the walls of europe he is working in the studio on a variety of personal and commercial collaborations. Starting as a traditional graffiti artist that dealt with the manipulation of typography, Oli-B has gradually transitioned from lettering to characters and finally to the present where the characters have evolved into amorphous shapes and colors that only hint at the presence of a figure with the occasional eye or mouth. (via)

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Baguette-Me-Nots Tumblr: Dada Meets “Cyber” Street Art

May 15, 2013 by Stacy Dacheux

Bierbaum and John Milhiser - Photography

From re-blogging work by other artists to generating your own solo digital exhibition, the ability to collect and show art has never been so fast, affordable, and publicly personable, thanks to Tumblr. According to Brad Troemel, viewing art on this platform can help us “gain a greater art-informed appreciation for worthy cultural relics long deemed non-art.”

Take Tim Bierbaum and John Miller. Their online “Baguette-Me-Nots” Tumblr blog series consistently pairs a vast array of comedians with baguettes in contemporary settings. While some might simply call this series a lowbrow photo fad parallel to “planking” or “breading cats,” others might compare it to something like Dada meets “cyber” street art– brilliantly funny, evoking nonsensical play, and showcased in an egalitarian manner: on a digital wall outside of the gallery system. After all, the word Dada might have been born from Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco’s constant usage of “da, da” meaning “yes, yes” in Romanian– a word comedians and improvisers know and love fondly.

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Robert Montgomery’s Conceptual And Poetic Public Art

May 13, 2013 by Stacy Dacheux

Jean Cocteau once said,”a poet doesn’t invent, he listens.”

The pieces built by self-proclaimed “melancholic post-situationist” artist Robert Montgomery, likewise, work as interesting dreamy receivers or lightning rods, absorbing bursts of humanity’s collective subconscious in relation to varying environments.

Translating frequencies and teetering between genres, Montgomery, in Interview Magazine asserts, “Obviously my own work comes from a conceptual art tradition, but I love the graffiti artists, and I feel spiritually closer to them than to most contemporary art; they make the city a free space of diverse voices and we shouldn’t get all cynical about them just because Banksy made some money.”

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Shadow Street Art Portraits Using Kitchen Strainers

May 3, 2013 by Danny Olda

Strainers are tools not often seen outside of the kitchen, much less in the art studio. However, artist Isaac Cordal puts them to use in a series of street installations titled Cement Bleak. For the series Cordal sculpts human faces into the mesh of the hand held strainers. The strainers are then inserted into the ground. Sunlight or streetlights pass through the strainers and project a shadow portrait onto the sidewalk. The nature of strainer’s mesh allows for a strangely realistic face from several angles of light.

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Graffiti From Wall To Gallery

April 30, 2013 by Stacy Dacheux

Miranda Donovan explores the invasion of graffiti from the exterior world of landscapes and buildings to the interior one– of bathrooms, bedrooms, and yes, even galleries, where street artists are finding more and more of a home these days. However, Donovan’s work is not just about street politics or the art of tagging here– each piece also examines the quality, textures, associations, and contexts of walls themselves.

Of her work, in Cool Hunting, Donovan states, “The point of departure is a wall, which so often people just overlook . . . It’s something in our daily space constantly, internally and externally, and there’s a romanticism in that, which draws me in. The different combination of languages, the grid, the broken plaster breaking up that grid, the colors, the erosion, is something that really excites me. It’s about combining those languages to tell a story about the passage of time and the analogy of the human psyche, peeling back the onion layers to find the core.”

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Nick Stern’s Living Recreations Of Banksy’s Street Art

April 26, 2013 by Danny Olda

The work of legendary street artist Banksy is now iconic, even throughout the larger art world. Photographer Nick Stern uses these easily recognizable images as a starting point. Stern literally brings Banksy’s pieces to life. He restages the wall art using real people and objects in place of the spray paint and posters. Using living subjects adds emphasis to the often powerful and startling art of Banksy.

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The Street Art Heaven At Les Bains

April 25, 2013 by Danny Olda

Les Bains project3

Despite its 130 year history Paris’ building known as Les Bains was declared unsafe in 2010. The building will undergo renovations and reopen in 2014. In the meantime, however, the building’s owner has opened it up to street artists. The residency program, known as One Day One Artist, allows artists to work in the sprawling building. The result is a kind of street art heaven. A small selection of the artists involved are pictured here: (respectively) The Atlas, Seth, Sambre, Jeanne Susplugas, SWIZ, Philippe Baudelocque, ZeeR, Thomas Canto, and STEN LEX. [via]

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The Polygonal Street Art Of Sy

April 16, 2013 by Danny Olda

Sy street art 8

Sy street art 9 Street artist Sy creates cleanly crafted murals. Rather than a hurriedly executed work, Sy’s pieces appear to be carefully planned to the extent of nearly seeming more at home in Adobe Illustrator than on an alley wall. Sy clearly references and draws inspiration from 8-bit graphics and the block y polygons of early computer animation. However, the simplistic graphics style really betray an expert use of light and perspective. Subtle color shifts and familiar imagery in a surprising context add depth to the murals of Sy.

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