Artful at the Affordable Art Fair in Battersea London

Affordable Art Fair | Art-PieThe Affordable Art Fair (AAF), taking place this week end in Battersea, is one of our favourite art fairs in London. We enjoy it for many reasons but above all because of the quality and diversity of the exhibitors such as Artful.

110 galleries with 1,100 artists

Get ready to add a splash of art to your walls as the Affordable Art Fair returns to Battersea Park this October. New galleries will fly in from across the globe to exhibit alongside fair favourites, so whether your taste is traditional or trailblazing, classic or cutting-edge, you’re sure to find an artwork to suit your space.

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Artful, stand F2

Artful | Art-PieMeet Joshua Blackburn, its founder:

“Photography is a narrative art that deals with snatched moments, like a form of visual eavesdropping. For me, this quality is what makes photography so engaging. The audience gets a window into an alternate reality that can be enigmatic and intriguing.

Night Visitors #4 by Adrian Siamson | Art-Pie
Night Visitors #4 by Adrian Siamson | Art-Pie

This is certainly what drew me to the works you find here. These stories, or story fragments, have an aura of the unreal and unexpected. Some, like Adrian Samson’s Night Visitors, are fantastic. Others, like James French’s Beach, are almost cinematic. Even familiar subjects – the city skyline, the petrol station, the forest – have an unfamiliar quality that draws me in.

I love work like this because I can return to it again and again and feel its pull. It’s a pleasure listening to a great storyteller, even when you’ve heard the story before, and it’s the same with great photography. You want to stop and look… and look again.”

Something Lurking: The Shadowmen of Richard Hambleton

Richard Hambleton has been called the godfather of street art. He began producing what he called ‘public art’ in New York City in the 1970s.

He’s known for the black figures he first painted on the buildings of New York’s Lower East Side, which he called Shadowmen. The Shadowmen arrived in the early 1980s, and shocked many a denizen of that city who walked the streets at night. In 1981 and 1982 he populated the Lower East Side with these unnerving figures.

the-shadowmen-2-hambleton

A reclusive man, physically gaunt (somewhat creepy-looking himself), Hambleton had undertaken work of a similar bent before. In his Mass Murder project in the late 1970s, he drew crime-scene outlines of dead bodies on the street and had volunteers play homicide victims. Passersby mistook the installations for the aftermaths of real murders.

Both these projects spoke to the zeitgeist, as US urban crime panics shook the nation in those decades. The Shadow men would shock passersby, who often mistook them for shadows of real people, possible assailants. Many people who lived in NYC around that time have stories of the moment they were petrified by a Shadowman and these stories seem to be almost a badge of honour top the artist with a distinctly morbid streak. For Hambleton audience reaction was integral to the artwork itself.

The Shadowmen by Richard Hambleton | Art-Pie
Click to enlarge

He said:

“Other artists put their work on the city, but what I paint on the walls is only part of the picture. The city psychologically completes the rest. People experience my paintings. They aren’t simply exposed to them.”

His art was apparently inspired by the shadows left on the sides of buildings by victims of the atomic blast on Hiroshima. In an age of Cold War anxiety, perhaps his work pointed at the way people’s lives seemed to rest on a knife edge.

The Shadowmen drew in other urban artists, who daubed over the black figures with their own work. Indeed, Hambleton was not a lone wolf. With Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, he was one of a legendary trio of New York artists at the forefront of the street art boom. The three regularly met to discuss their work with one another, and sometimes collaborated.

His work began to pop up all over the globe. Shadowmen even appeared on the Berlin Wall in 1984, when he painted 17 life-size figures on its eastern side. His Shadowman paintings have been documented by photographer Hank O’Neal.

Take a look at the gallery here: http://www.hankonealphoto.com/index.php/the-shadow-man

The Shadowmen by Richard Hambleton | Art-Pie

The Shadowmen by Richard Hambleton | Art-Pie

The Shadowmen by Richard Hambleton | Art-Pie

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This article was written by Sally Kirchell, owner of Blue Horizon Prints an Australian online canvas prints company offering cutting edge prints in a wide variety of styles from Street Art to Vintage Prints. They offer free delivery to the UK and Australia and deliver all over the
world

Team Robbo calling at Signal gallery

Already a legend within the international graffiti community, London’s ‘King Robbo’ will soon lead his entire UK crew (known to the world as ‘Team Robbo’) into Signal Gallery for their first gallery show of the year.

Team Robbo is an intentionally amorphous and anonymous graffiti crew, which has now grown into The Team Robbo Network. Its presence stretches across the world, overseas members working in collaboration with their UK counterparts.

Team Robbo UK will be represented in this show by core crew members: ROBBO, CHOCI-ROC, DOZE, FUEL, PRIME and P.I.C. – some of whom have worked together as a crew for around 25 years!

They will be supported by the artist known as ‘Pranksky’, who provides coverage of Team Robbo’s continuing war with street artists via his media organization, Prank Sky Media.

Several members of Team Robbo are already well-known to members of the street art/ graffiti community and to art collectors alike. This stemmed from several very successful shows last year, including Robbo’s solo show at The Pure Evil Gallery plus Fuel & Prime’s work in ‘The Architects’ Group Show at The Atom Rooms in London. Prime’s controversial piece ‘The Age of Shiva’ was widely publicised when it appeared again last year in Pictures on Walls’ show – ‘Marks and Stencils’ before Christmas.

The crew’s new show, ‘The Sell-Out Tour’ (which can be interpreted in a variety of ways), will be the first time that Team Robbo UK have exhibited in a gallery together.

It will showcase an impressive variety of their work: prints, canvases, sculpture and photographic work. The photographs trace Team Robbo’s joint output, (both legal and illegal) over the years. They will be shown alongside new solo work where crew members push forward the graffiti genre and develop their own work in highly divergent and novel artistic directions. The show is expected to tour the world after the Signal Gallery launch.

The Sell-Out Tour will be supported by work by the artist Pranksky. His work is described as hybrid art (merging art, photography and graffiti) providing a commentary on the ongoing art feud between street artists and graffiti writers that has received considerable media attention.

The show offers a rare chance to both view and purchase original new works and prints by this notorious crew. All work shown is for sale.

Words by Signal gallery

When
7th April: Private View and Press.
8th April: Writer’s night (By invitation only).
8th April – 7th May: open to public.

Where 32 Paul Street | Hoxton, London, EC2A 4LB.
www.signalgallery.com

Rippled, light painting and animation at their best

There are quite a few light-painting based videos/animations out there these days, some very well done, some others a bit less but what about this one – “RIPPLED“, another collaboration between Darcy Prendergast and the creative team at OH YEAH WOW.

Two words – truly amazing.

You do not get perfection or beauty without pain. 6 months is how long this work took to get wrapped up and frame by frame animation and long exposure technique were how they proceeded. The camera was the weapon and the creativity topped it all off.

Track – All India Radio- The Silent Surf

Malika Favre – Hide and Seek at Kemistry gallery

Malika Favre "Hide and Seek" | Art-PieNow in its summer break, the London art scene has slightly slowed down and galleries are either busy relaxing or putting altogether their next shows. One of these that has caught our eyes and attention is the “Hide and Seek” show by Malika Favre at Kemistry gallery.

This show is for the minimalistic art enthusiast and if you love prints, you should definitely come and see Malika Favre’s Hide and Seek show and become fascinated by the story of a furtive yet sophisticated woman very much looking like the elegant woman you would find strolling on the Champs Elysees in Paris. Malika Favre is from France and you can clearly feel a Parisian looking woman influence in her character.

<img src="http://www.artpie.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/malika-favre.jpg" alt="Malika Favre "Hide and Seek" | Art-Pie" title="malika-favre" width="200" height="283" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-6779" />

The video that has been put together for the show – see below, is a real treat and is as funny in a way as intriguing. The woman keeps popping out of different patterns which are cleverly mixed together to lose viewers into them and thus increase the surprise effect when the woman appears.

From Kemistry gallery “Fascinated by patterns in everyday life, urban surroundings and architecture, French born Malika Favre has put together Hide and Seek, her first solo show in London. Malika’s work is bold and minimalistic, exploring the relationship between positive and negative space.”

From the artist “there is such beauty and intrigue in those repetitive concrete balconies, I felt like creating a series of abstract prints based on the architectural patterns that no one really notices.”

The 8 high end screenprints will be available for purchase at the gallery and online, each print is limited, signed and numbered by Malika Favre.

Malika Favre “Hide & Seek” | 6th Sept — 29th Sept 2012
Private View: Thursday 6th September 18:00 —21:00 | 43 Charlotte Road| London EC2A 3PD

LUDO at Starkart gallery – La Belle Vie

We arrived in Zurich to find that the centre of town, near where we are staying is insanely upper class. Ferrari’s and Bentleys cruising the streets typically driven by what looked like teenage boys and the main streets lined with cafe’s filled with people wearing Gucci sunglasses laughing and sipping their cocktails.

It was not something that we were expecting and thought that it was extremely superficial, until we ventured of the beaten track in search of Starkart gallery that was hosting the LUDO solo show.

The neighbourhood that Starkart is located in is very culturally diverse and much more down to earth.

Starkart is one of the most understated spaces we have come across, set inside an old residence turned commercial space that gives no impression of what is happening behind the scenes.

The Ludo show is set over multiple rooms on two levels, it is a minimalistic show, with the works widely spread out to make use of the vast space provided.

The ground floor displays originals from his “nature’s revenge” series and the basement features two video installations of his work processes, from creation to installation on the street.

It really felt like urban exploration venturing into this show, moving from room to room, some brightly lit and others very dark with the sound of what seemed like a old French record echoing from the basement.

Check out the full set of Ludo pics here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chasingghosts/sets/72157626390493355/

STREET ART