Art news

A friend showed me this animation after I expressed a vague desire to photograph all the great street art around here. Clearly there is no point in doing so as nothing will ever top this for a combination of graf & snaps.

Described by the crazy-brilliant Italian urban artist BLU as "an ambiguous animation painted on public walls" in Buenos Aires and Baden, It is quite possibly the coolest thing you will ever see.

Check out more of BLU's stuff here.

We live in a visually saturated world that continues to bombard us with hundreds of advertising messages every day. From billboards to blimps, we face the reality of becoming a suffocated society that's moving into atrophy. As a result brands such as the European jeans label Diesel (inspired by the Absolut campaign: In An Absolute World, perhaps?), decided it was time to “salvage what precious public space is left,” handing over giant urban canvases to its inhabitants and in turn creating the 'worlds largest outdoor gallery'.
Around 5 months ago the Diesel Wall project set out on its journey in search of 4 artists from around the globe, providing them with the possibility of stamping their mark on 4 key cultural wall spaces within 4 major cities. The premise: “take your art, your powers of dissuasion; your ability to disrupt; incite; excite; inspire and intrigue; to make comment; to make beautiful; to make real; to make people think again”.

After much public deliberation most of the results are in. Check em out:

New York - Jonathan Sandridge

Manchester - Tim Hensel

Zurich - Andreas Marti

Barcelona - Still to be announced

Nieves is an independent publishing house based in Zurich, Switzerland.

With the Chinese Olympics just days away, I thought you'd find this particular work from Chinese-born and German-raised artist Yang Liu very fitting. It's amazing how such a complex cultural topic: East Meets West can be encapsulated within such a simple set of dots, lines and squiggles.

If you’re heading to New York City any time soon, don’t think you’re tripping out when you see the notorious piles of dark green/black filled trash bags replaced with artist-created bright pink and white polkadot 100% biodegradable ones.
 
TRASH: Any Colour you Like, is a viewer generated public art installation created by Berlin/New York-based contemporary artist Adrian with the help of local business owners and residents. The aim of this project is to beautify NYC and to raise public awareness of the arts and the environment in one creatively pungent initiative.

Emily Hunt and Raquel Welch are as funny, irreverent and downright bizarre as the pages of their cult publication, DUKE Magazine. When they're not asking interns to dress as hillbillies or commissioning pieces on inner-west dance troupes, the two are also known to be pretty great artists - with their work often addressing interests in pop/ freak culture and celebrity. This Thursday you can se it for yourself when Black and Blue hosts the opening of Hoochie Coochie; Raquel and Emily's first collaborative art show. The curious duo have teamed up to create "an eccentric array of puppets, paintings and diorama scenes in some kind of strange fantasy land". Ummm it all looks totally grotesque and creepy to me  - meaning i'll be all over it like an errant hair extension to Britney's passenger seat. Hoochie Coochie opens this Thursday, August 7 at 302/267-271 Cleveland Street.

We live in a visually saturated world that continues to bombard us with hundreds of advertising messages every day. From bicycles to blimps, we face the reality of becoming a suffocated society that's moving into atrophy. As a result brands such as the European jeans label Diesel (inspired by the Absolut campaign: An Absolute World, perhaps?), decided it was time to “salvage what precious public space is left,” handing over giant urban canvases to its inhabitants and in turn creating the 'worlds largest outdoor gallery'.
Around 5 months ago The Diesel Wall project set out on its journey in search of 4 artists from around the globe, providing them with the possibility of stamping their mark on 4 key cultural wall spaces within 4 major cities. The premise: “take your art, your powers of dissuasion; your ability to disrupt; incite; excite; inspire and intrigue; to make comment; to make beautiful; to make real; to make people think again”.

After much public deliberation most of the results are in. Check em out:

New York - Jonathan Sandridge

Manchester - Tim Hensel

Zurich - Andreas Marti

Barcelona - Still to be announced