THE PAINT CLUB
On Saturday evening, The Paint Club invited three talented urban art teams from Amsterdam to compete in a 70 minutes long battle on 2,44m x 1,24m white canvases:

- Art is a Battlefield (Anne Mercedes Langhorst & Nadia van Luijk)
- Multisyndicate Amsterdam (Boterham & Skating Chinchilla)
- Team Funkadelics (Dan Sapunar & Marcus Gestré)

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The PAINT CLUB winners
Armed with black&white and colour markers each team created a top artwork within the theme “Out of Space”. At the end the audience voted “MULTISYNDICATE AMSTERDAM” as winner, closely followed by both 2nd place “Team Funkadelics” and 3rd place “Art in a Battlefield”.

Multisyndicate Amsterdam will compete with the winners of all upcoming pre-rounds at the Netherland Paint Club Finals at the Kosmopolite Art Tour Festival in June.

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STICK TOGETHER AMSTERDAM
30 artists from Amsterdam and different European cities such as Case (MaClaim Crew, DE), Jorge Herrera Fuentealba & Otto Schade (Chili), Tona (DE), Zed1 (IT), Ottograph (NL), DHM (NL), BustArt (CH), Light-painting Artist Tim van Vliet (NL) and many more exhibited in the monumental warehouse space of cultural centre Roest during this unique happening.

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About the event

Pow Wow Hawaii is the collaborative gathering of creatives from around the world in the city of Honolulu, sharing in the process of art and music with the local community and abroad.

In its fourth year showcase, following the preceding successful years and increasing amount of participants, we aim to make the event more accessible to the public through the production of a book and film. The book will contain high resolution photos of all the completed murals, covering all major Pow Wow 2013 satellite events, with sketches and interviews by artists and Pow Wow organizers. This year’s event will be documented on film from opening showcase to the closing finale, including exclusive behind-the-scenes footage on the participants’ experiences and into the minds of internationally renowned artists as they create art from the starting concept to the finished piece.

Since 2010
Pow Wow 2010 started out with a few artists, including founder Jasper Wong, Wu Yue, Will Barras, Pat Lee, and Jahan produced live art, with DJs Verbal and Yoon providing musical inspirations for two days in Hong Kong. The second year followed, moving Pow Wow 2011 to the beautiful island of Oahu for four days with new artists including Suitman, Aaron de la Cruz, Jeff Hamada, 123Klan, Meggs, Prime, Ekundayo, and Kamea Hadar where it became groundbreaking for the local art community. In becoming an annual Hawaii event, Pow Wow 2012 doubled the artists list with bigger names and took over beautifying the streets of Honolulu for a week.

Photos 2013

Photos (C) Juxtapoz’ Kristin Farr

About the show
For its final show in its Amsterdam space before a transatlantic move to California, GUNS & BUTTER launches Summer Phantoms, featuring four faces from the Amsterdam artscape: the Academy Director (Ralph de Lange), the Burmese royal (Sawan Yawnghwe), the visionary sculptor (Midas Zwaan) and the up-and-comer (Vasco Vicente).

SAWAN YAWNGHWE

Yawnghwe’s suite is based loosely on Martin Kippenberger’s Spiderman Studio of 1996, in which Kippenberger plays with the idea of the 20th century artist as superhero and questions how heroic those artists actually were. Referencing art historical precedents on each surface, Yawnghwe enters a tête-à-tête with Kippenberger. He repaints the artist as superhero, who, conducting his work in secret, is conflicted with his own power and responsibility to the public.

RALPH DE LANGE

At the center of de Lange’s installation is Cleopatra. She who was said to control every gaze, is lost here under layers, merely an image of an image, an icon exclusively perceived and transmitted through visual representations. Centuries of male fantasies, of her exoticism, luminosity, opulent wealth and power, diminished to a picture of Elizabeth Taylor on a pale book.

Views of nature, behind multi-hued filters, appear as film stills. The series conveys a mood or a feeling but without a plot. Setting the landscapes in a state of flux, De Lange suggests nature’s underlying dreamy structures, endless growth and abundance, and, ultimately, underlines our shared need to connect with it and the stories we create.

MIDAS ZWAAN

In antique stores across the Netherlands, Zwaan hunts for found objects with which he constructs baroque, surrealist, carnivalesque structures. Echoing the dark unease of early 20th century readymades, the second-hand objects, in their new function, become symbols for the excess of consumer society, one that benefits from death and power. Memories and sentiments play a central role in Zwaan’s work. A diversity of auction crates, pirate chests and suitcases become nostalgic show boxes. Decadently appealing and suggestively threatening, Zwaan’s choice of objects amplifies the ominous atmosphere of destruction, fame and self-promotion. A look into these show boxes requires a meticulous eye that plays with the magic and intimacy between the spectator and the work.

VASCO VICENTE

Vicente, a Portuguese art director, began drawing, sketching, and painting, in order to make visible what navigated him. Previously, as Vicente does in his vocation, he employed design programs in the execution of the final stage of his work. Yet he realized an authentic expression was vacant in each piece. Turning to traditional methods, imperfections and textures started to make sense, and Vicente found in his disillusionment with the digital that craft is not dead; it is possible to do everything with one’s hands.

The works exhibited here take their point of departure through Vicente’s expat lens of Amsterdam contemporary youth culture. Documented moments become isolated icons— strangely beautiful and discretely grotesque.

The list of Urban Art related events and exhibitions, he participated in, is long and prolific – just to name a few of the most important ones: Meeting of Styles (various European cities), Int. Biennale of Graffiti in Sao Paulo, Cultura Urbana Madrid, Showroom Gallery NYC, Prosper Gallery Tokyo and many more.

Okuda created his own style of artistic expression – a mature development of “Street-Art” – in our opinion. Geometric, bright-colored abstract shapes, as a dominant eye-catcher, stand in a contrasty interplay with grey-shaded organic forms and shapes. An essential part of his work includes the artistic dispute with topics such as existentialism, the universe, the infinite, meaning of life or the false freedom of capitalism. It shows the existent conflict between modernity and our roots of life.

Okuda is an artist we can expect next-level Urban Art in the coming years and we will keep an close eye on his further development.

Website: http://okudart.es

Photos Street work

Photos Gallery work

Overview
Faith47’s Fragments of a Burnt History, showing at David Krut Projects Parkwood from 8 November 2012 to mid-January 2013, is comprised of an installation of found objects and artwork created in the artist’s studio, as well as a new series of monotypes and editions produced in collaboration with the David Krut Print Workshop. Faith47, based in Cape Town, is a recognised street artist whose work can be found in cities all over the world. She has an established international gallery career, with exhibitions in Europe, America and Australia, but Fragments of a Burnt History is her first solo exhibition in South Africa, indicating a culture of cross-over from street to studio that is already well underway abroad.

Artwork
The body of work presented in this exhibition is, appropriately, drawn from the artist’s experience of her own country, particularly the city of Johannesburg. Although the work is not a direct interpretation of the city, her experience is of Johannesburg as a representative African city, the streets full of the energy of transformation and endless possibility, but also the evidence of the harsh realities of day to day life. In her street painting in Johannesburg over the years, Faith47 has concentrated on the process of making the work, and the spaces she can explore in order to find appropriate locations for her paintings. She describes having painted for hours ‘in empty buildings that felt like spiritual experiences, exploring holy chambers of neglected architecture…finding something so beautiful in what society disregards, and bringing to life that which people usually throw away or ignore.’* As a result of this approach, she has accumulated masses of reference material – phrases scrawled on the walls of abandoned buildings, illustrations under bridges, political slogans on structures in city centres and on roadsides.

Video

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Website Faith47: http://www.faith47.com/
Website Gallery: http://davidkrutprojects.com

Photos of JayOne’s recent work:

About Barry McGee
Barry McGee (born 1966 in San Francisco) is a painter and graffiti artist. He is also known by monikers such as Ray Fong, Lydia Fong, Bernon Vernon, P.Kin, Ray Virgil, Twist.

McGee rose out of the Mission School art movement and graffiti boom in the San Francisco Bay Area during the early nineties. His work draws heavily from a pessimistic view of the urban experience, which he describes as, “urban ills, overstimulations, frustrations, addictions & trying to maintain a level head under the constant bombardment of advertising”.

McGee’s paintings are very iconic, with central figures dominating abstracted backgrounds of drips, patterns and color fields. He has also painted portraits of street characters on their own empty bottles of liquor, painted flattened spray cans picked up at train yards and painted wrecked vehicles for art shows.

McGee has had numerous shows in many kinds of galleries and was also an artist in residence at inner-city McClymonds High School in Oakland, California in the early 1990s.

It is the first solo exhibition by the artists. As the title implicates, the artists give graffiti a ride that is bound to a new direction. The works on show, re-interpret and transfer graffiti from its convential medium to another surrounding.

About the artists
One group, known variously as MOSES & TAPS™, ERNI & BERT™, and INTERNATIONAL TOPSPRAYER: MOSES & TAPS™, has grabbed the attention of both law enforcement officials and art critics. The ever-changing name of this collective is not borne out of indecision or marketing. Rather, it helps conceal the identities of its members while still defying the unwritten laws of graffiti: anonymity. The pseudonym is the signature that gives the work recognition value – for fans and for the police as well.

The international Topsprayer book
In 2011, the collective, who rigorously decided against an online presence, published a volume of their works for the first time. Across 288 pages, INTERNATIONAL TOPSPRAYER: MOSES & TAPS™ is a showcase of the group’s ambition to take graffiti to another level. Over the course of 1000 days, they spray-painted 1000 railway carriages. Some looked like typical graffiti, others were more conceptual. One work involved painting false doors and windows on a wagon, a trompe l’oeil effect that led to great confusion on the platform the next morning. On another carriage, the artists took a more ironically playful approach. They spray-painted a sign like those issued by German railway authorities, which warn that the train’s surface is protected by anti-graffiti coating.

Graffiti is Vandalism?
Whether graffiti is described as scribbling, art, vandalism, or urban propaganda, it has long hovered between unlawful and lawful expression. Today, the gap between the two has narrowed. While street graffiti remains a form of vandalism, it is increasingly considered an art form, too. Some of those notorious paint sprayers are now defined as graffiti artists, whose works are exhibited, traded, collected, and analyzed. Graffiti has become a key influence in the world of contemporary art.

FB Event: http://www.facebook.com/events/284529031669652/
Ruttkowski68 Gallery: http://www.ruttkowski68.com

C215, is the moniker of Christian Guémy, a French street artist hailing from Paris who has been described as “France’s answer to Banksy”.

C215 primarily uses stencils to produce his art. His first stencil work was put up in 2006, but he has been a graffiti artist for over 20 years. His work consists mainly of close up portraits of people. C215′s subjects are typically those such as beggars, homeless people, refugees, street kids and the elderly. The rationale behind this choice of subject is to draw attention to those that society has forgotten about. C215 is a prolific street artist and has practiced his art in cities all over the world. His stencils may be seen in Barcelona, Amsterdam, London, Rome, Paris and Oslo.

Photos exhibition

Photos (C) Montana Gallery BCN

Artist Flickr: www.c215.com

Director Henry Chalfant introduces his film All City (1983), which grew out of an idea to do a youth TV program about Hip Hop and other cultural phenomena of interest to young urbanites. The program was never realized, but the trailer grew into a portrait of the different elements of Hip Hop in the mid-80s. The venue is Fashion Moda, a popular art gallery on Third Avenue in the Bronx. There is a demonstration of Bboying, and Rap, followed by a discussion, hosted by Spank TC5, about art and culture with important graffiti artists of the time including Dondi, Butch, Mare and Brim. The video includes a montage of murals by Henry Chalfant and a Pop and Lock lesson by Mr. Wiggles. It features the young Bboy crew, VTB, The Very Tough Breakers.

About Henry Chalfant
Starting out as a sculptor in New York in the 1970s, Chalfant turned to photography and film to do an in-depth study of hip-hop culture and graffiti art. One of the foremost authorities on New York subway art,and other aspects of urban youth culture, his photographs record hundreds of ephemeral, original art works that have long since vanished. Exhibits of his photos include the O.K. Harris Gallery and the landmark ‘New York-New Wave’ show at P.S. l, and important galleries and museums in Europe. He has co-authored the definitive account of New York graffiti art, Subway Art (Holt Rinehart Winston, N.Y. 1984) and a sequel on the art form’s world-wide diffusion, Spray Can Art (Thames and Hudson Inc. London, 1987).

Website: http://henrychalfant.com

About the show
MadC’s work is inspired by graffiti and the perfect connection of letters, foreground, and background. With the constant evolution and argument of graffiti as an art form, the show aims to keep the energy of this art form alive on canvas without taking it directly from the street. While using spray paint, acrylic paint, watercolors and ink, she hopes to push the boundaries of what graffiti is conceived as and inspire future generations to take new approaches to the art form.

Photos

Photos (C) Marco Porsch

About the artist
Claudia Walde aka ”MadC”, was born in 1980 in Germany and studied at the University of Art and Design Burg Giebichenstein in Halle, Germany, as well as the world-renowned Central Saint Martins College in London. In 1998, Claudia started spray-painting the walls of her hometown and in a few short years, her murals have spanned Lebanon, Mexico, Colombia, Russia, USA, Hawaii, South Africa and most of Europe. In 2007, Claudia Walde also authored a successful book, “Street Fonts – Graffiti Alphabets from Around the World“ which was published in 6 different languages.

Artist website: clemensbehr.com