street art

WILL BARRAS

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(UK)

Will Barras is an artist, illustrator, and animation director who lives and creates in London.

Barras grew up in Birmingham and moved to Bristol to study graphic design. He became one of a new crop of young artists working in Bristol's renowned street-art scene. He was a founding member of the Scrawl collective, alongside Steff Plaetz and Mr. Jago, thanks to his representations of fluid movement, unique narrative-driven composition, and line work. Scrawl published a seminal book in 1999 to document the new movement. 

As such, Barras traveled extensively, live-painting and exhibiting pieces throughout Europe, the U.S., and Asia. Though Scrawl slowed down, he continued to paint and furthered his technique, collaborating with Stolen Space and the Brussels-based HLP. He currently takes on commercial projects of interest and directs animation at Th1ng studio in central London.

Watch this video of Will in Oslo:


SMITHE

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(Mexico City)

Smithe has been making art since he was 12 years old. Born and raised in the streets of Mexico City, he got an appreciation for the street art around his neighborhood and it developed into a full time lifestyle / career. 

Art has opened doors for him and allowed him to travel to different countries and practice his passion. With art shows in England, Belgium and Germany, Smithe has already made quite a name for himself in the international street art and graffiti scene. His talents don’t stop with a spray can either, Smithe is a fantastic illustrator and sculptor and he plays in a band in D.F., “Punto Stendal”.

Watch this video of Smithe's battle for the big apple by All City Cavnvas:

SILVER WARNER

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(San Francisco, US)

Silver was born and raised in SF and has been a bike messenger since 1991. His photography is often featured in Hamburger Eyes and has been in many publications from Tokion to Nylon. He has also been a part of numerous gallery shows across the U.S. and in Europe and Japan. Aside from the fine art world, Silver has been an icon in underground street art and publishing some of the seminal 'zines to come from the Bay Area over the last 15 years.

SHEPARD FAIREY

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(1970, South Carolina, US)

Frank Shepard Fairey is an American contemporary street artist, graphic designer, activist and illustrator who emerged from the skateboarding scene. He first became known for his "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" (…OBEY…) sticker campaign while attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), which appropriated images from the comedic supermarket tabloid Weekly World News.

Fairey's first art museum exhibition, entitled Supply & Demand (as was his earlier book), was held in Boston at the Institute of Contemporary Art during the summer of 2009. The exhibition featured more than 250 works in a wide variety of media: screen prints, stencils, stickers, rubylith illustrations, collages, and works on wood, metal and canvas.

As a complement to the ICA exhibition, Fairey created public art works around Boston. The artist explains his driving motivation: "The real message behind most of my work is 'question everything'."

In July of 2015, Fairey was arrested and detained at Los Angeles International Airport, after passing through customs, on a warrant for allegedly vandalizing 14 buildings in Detroit. He subsequently turned himself in to Detroit Police.

Watch this video of OBEY:


SAN

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(Spain)

Born Daniel Munoz Rodriquez, San is an internationally recognized and commissioned illustrator, painter, and street artist. Born in a small Spanish village near the Portuguese border, San currently works and resides in Madrid. His artwork is influenced by magical realism, graffiti, and culinary arts. San has shown his fine art internationally, as well as his street art in cities across Europe.

QUICK & SEEN

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(1958, New York, US) / (1961, New York, US)

Lin Felton aka QUIK is a painter and graffiti artist from New York. He was born in Queens in 1958 and started using graffiti to display his art in subways. He is known for his comical and satirical style that is known to be arrogant. Felton started tagging the walls of Queens at the age of 10, taking the name Star10. His fascination for this world started when he saw the metro trains in movement covered in tags. He then changed his name to QUIK and signs wherever he can.

Richard "Richie" Mirando, known as Seen UA, born 1961 in the Bronx, New York City, is one of the most well known graffiti artists in the world, often referred to as the Godfather of Graffiti, although he did not pioneer the movement.

Seen first started to paint on New York City subway system in 1973. His crew United Artists (or simply UA) quickly gained the reputation for producing full-color throw-ups on whole cars with members such as Pjay, Duster, Sin, and his brother Mad.

Watch this video by Walrus TV:


PEZ

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(1976, Spain)

Pez started painting in 1999 in his hometown Barcelona. Specifically, he got into street art writing his signature, which soon took the shape of a fish. Little by little his tags turned into the shape of a smiling blue fish, and he became a celebrity throughout Barcelona.

Writing that peculiar signature, and influenced by comic and urban subcultures, he was interested in searching for a character whose language was universal. This was the birth of his famous character; a fish with a huge smile. 

His works appear in the best-known street art books: Street Logos, Art of Rebellion, Street Art, Bcn New York, in specialized magazines and internet websites. Last years, Pez has been creating several characters, not only his fish character, but also demons, angels, giraffes, and Martians. There is one thing they all have in common: a huge smile.

Check out this video by 55tvc:


PEAT WOLLAEGER

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(St. Louis, MO, US)

Peat 'EYEZ' Wollaeger has been drawing and painting ever since he was a kid. He started doing commercial art in the 90’s and continued for almost a decade, creating urban designs for such clients as Coca-Cola, R. J. Reynolds, M&M Mars, Anheuser Busch and some lesser evils. Burned out with the graphic arts scene and not creating any personal art, he started using stencils and spray enamels to reproduce his illustrations, and now it’s his medium of choice. 

Internationally known for his whimsical, raw, and brightly-colored stenciled characters that include, Mr. Teeth, the Dead Fat Comedians, Albino Alley Cat, and the Luchador series, Peat Wollaeger is one hard-working artist. His work can been seen all over the globe. His Luchador room at Hotel Des Arts in San Francisco, his massive wall tribute to Keith Hairing at Art Basel in Miami, the 700,000 aluminum bottles of Mountain Dew with emblazoned with his original design, his recent exhibit in Melbourne, Australia, Peat Wollaeger's art is everywhere. 

Watch this video of 'Opening Eyez on the Street' by TEDx Talks:


PAUL INSECT

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(UK)

Paul Insect is a street artist, who is most famous for his 2007 solo show Bullion exhibition at London's Art gallery, Lazarides Gallery. Damien Hirst is reported to be a fan of Insect, having purchased the show days before it opened. Insect, who also goes by the name of PINS, worked alongside well-known artist Banksy at the Cans Festival, Santas Ghetto, and on the separation wall in Palestine.

Insect is well known for his collective named 'insect' which started in 1996, and disbanded in 2005. Insect held an exhibition at a disused Sex shop in London's Kings Cross area in 2008 in partnership with Lazarides Gallery. This contained 12 bronze skulls with colour enameled bunny ears.

Watch this video of Paul Insect with BAST:


PAT THOMPSON

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(Canada)

Patrick Thompson's installations of painting, wall drawings, printmaking and sculpture, are investigations of the idea of information; explored through mass media, architecture, history and the dynamics of culture, defined equally by their range and their lyrical visual language.

Highly esteemed for pushing the boundaries of street art, he has painted outdoors under the pseudonym Evoke throughout North and Central America, Europe, and Asia. Thompson is often placed into the "Canadian School" of street artists including Other, Labrona, and Thesis Sahib, a group known for their inspired improvisations and openness towards freeform mark making.

Thompson's own creative process develops through a self-coined process he refers to as "mistakism", whereby the artist allows a memory, feeling, sentence, or some other bite of information to spark the beginning of a particular work. Imagery follows, inspired by the 'in-between' places found throughout the Canadian landscape, converging into dreamlike scenes. This union creates a pictorial space where imaginary characters, forms and marks can interact in a place that is whimsical as well as charged.

Watch this video by DevotionBCN:


MISS VAN

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(1973, Toulouse, France)

Miss Van started wall-painting at the age of 20, in 1993, initiating the feminine movement in Street Art. Originating from Toulouse, France and having spent most of her artistic life in Barcelona, Miss Van has travelled the world painting her instantly recognizable women on the streets, as well as on canvas. She has exhibited extensively for decades worldwide in Europe, USA and Asia.

Miss Van’s recent artistic pursuits have taken her to Los Angeles, Miami , Spain and Brazil, which hallmarks a recent return to street art, after several years spent solely painting in the studio, charging her new works with increased depth, emotion and an elevated romantic darkness and delicacy. Her iconic sultry female characters reappear in sensual yet dark animal masks and evolving environments.

In a gauzy romantic compositions, they carry a surreal quality of burlesque, resonating with a beautiful synergy of rawness, softness and emotion.

Watch this interview by Friends We Love:


LONDON POLICE

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(1998)

The London Police started in 1998 when big English geezers headed to Amsterdam to rejuvenate the visually disappointing streets of the drug capital of the world.

The motive was to combine travelling and making art to create an amazing way of life not seen since the days of King Solomon. From 2002 onward TLP started sending missionaries into all corners of the globe. Known for their iconic LADS characters and precision marking TLP have recently celebrated 10 strong years in the art world and their work has graced streets and galleries in 35 countries during this time.

London policemen have come and gone but founding members are still known to walk the streets of every city in the world spreading love with pens and stickers.

Watch this video of The London Police painting a mural at Art Basel 2007:

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KORALIE

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(1977, Montpellier, France)

Koralie belongs to a new generation of boundary-breaking French artists that has emerged since the turn of the millennium and is now carving its mark on the global scene of street art.

Koralie—originally spelt with a “c”—did not plan to become a street artist. She graduated with a degree in architecture and worked for advertising agencies. But when she moved to Toulouse, in southwest France, graffiti was part of the local landscape and she began mingling with emerging street artists. “They told me: ‘You paint on canvas. You should paint on walls.’” At 22, she traded the canvas for the wall. “I used to think that street art was a lack of modesty: Why should I force people to see my art? Who am I to do that?” she recalls. “But then I thought: Architects do the same thing. They create buildings without asking anyone.”

She went on to become one of the most promising artists of her generation, also dabbling in graphic design and recently creating a highly prized Dunny, an action figure made of soft, smooth vinyl released last year. Her work has been seen on the streets and galleries of Tokyo, Paris, Rome, Munich, Barcelona, San Diego, and San Francisco to name a few. In New York, her work is showcased at the Joshua Liner Gallery in Manhattan. She has collaborated on numerous projects with clothing brands like Billabong, Etnies, Upper Playground, and Carhartt, In addition she has done illustrations for magazines and CD covers.

Watch this video of Koraline and Supakitch:

KMNDZ

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(Los Angeles, US)

KMNDZ, aka Johnny Rodriguez, is a Los Angeles artist who paints weatherbeaten, suffering steampunk robots and mysterious mechanical devices with street-art style and masterly technique.

A successful leader in the graphic design community, this Los Angeles based artist, has worked for some of the world’s premier design agencies and top entertainment companies. With brands like MTV Networks, Universal Pictures, Microsoft, Lexus, Disney, and Activision populating his resume, Johnny has built an impressive portfolio of both artistic and technological accomplishments in the world of graphic design and new-media. However, first and foremost, Johnny is an artist. He attributes his success in commercial design as a direct result of his passion for art. KMDNZ is about both the past and the future.

Rodriguez’s personal work is quite different from his commercial endeavors. When he sits down to paint, he puts aside the pressures of mass appeal and commercial accessibility, and instead focuses on creating art for himself. Drawing from his own life, his paintings are filled with memories of family and friends, religious undertones, and iconic elements. A recent piece features a drawing of an audio cassette embedded into a hand grenade. This represents a tough look back at the time when his father left their family to fight a war in Nicaragua, and left only an audio recording to explain his actions. 

Watch Johnny painting in his studio:

HERBERT BAGLIONE

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(1977, São Paulo, Brazil)

Internationally known graffiti artist, Herbert Baglione, has been making compelling and narrative works on both the streets and in galleries for years. Baglione is renowned for his strong, simplistic street murals that are reminiscent of cave drawings, morphed with extraterrestrial images, brilliantly placed on rooftops and street surfaces, which are only visible in their entirety from an aerial view. His images are of the obese and the painfully anorexic - extremes of human shapes, elongated and rounded for the ultimate in simplistic, dramatic and iconic human symbols; thus illustrating his interest in human imperfection and extremes.

Baglione's art is constantly evolving and changing via strong aesthetics and visual language, though his figurative subjects remain constant. He relies heavily on a monotone palette of black, white and golden hues. At times, Baglione's work has had a strong minimalist and simplistic bent whilst still utilizing his elaborate calligraphic language. 

Regarding his installations, he has expressed to have a particular interest in finding places he has never worked before, such as a garden from the seventeenth century, in the city of La Rochelle, ruins, a Church from the sixteenth century in the town of Celles Sur Belle and an underground hospital complex in Niort. Baglione, who uses a deep narrative as the basis of each painting, believes that: "An artist who stimulates the spectator's pleasure and desire to research his production is most important. Being just aesthetically beautiful is not enough."

Watch this video of the work and technique of Herbert Baglione by Walrus TV:

HERA

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(1981, Germany)

Since 2004 the German street art duo Hera and Akut form a fruitful partnership having worked together on various successful global art projects. Their art works can be found in big cities around the world – from Toronto to Kathmandu, from San Francisco to Melbourne. Their joint creative art process is dialogical, among themselves as well as towards the outside by embracing the public. It’s about storytelling, the creation of imaginary worlds and inspiring their figures with individual characters. Hera sets the characters’ form and proportions, whilst Akut paints the photorealistic elements. The further process is determined jointly by the two artists. 

Together they experiment with different formats, materials and methods. Their art works ‘natural home’ is the public space, where everyone can take a pause from the city buzz in front of one of their massive murals. Equally, their gallery pieces, installations and canvases are characterized by their narrative style and their ability to lead the viewer into the imagination of those two exceptional artists. There is a pictorial and textual component in their art pieces. The short quotes, passages or descriptions written next to the figures are references to the character’s life. As a central theme, their figures can be seen in the context of social fractions and collective constraints, but also embedded into fabulous quotes that tell us of love. Thus, the figures reflect the diversity of life.

Herakut’s paintings are sensuous, savage, and always remarkable for their powerful dualism. Akut’s photorealistic details play out against Hera’s expressive, more gestural, line-work in canvases that seem poised to articulate stories of triumph and hardship. Humor and text are weaved their way into the work effortlessly.

Watch this video:


EVOL

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(1972, Berlin, Germany)

With a degree in product design, street artist Evol has become known for his urban installations and paintings made on reclaimed cardboard. Evol is interested in depicting the urban lives of ordinary people in decaying buildings. For his public practice, he turns electrical boxes and street fixtures into miniature architectural models of austere apartments, using a process that combines pasting paper, stenciling, and painting. 

He also stencils and paints urban street scenes and buildings onto cardboard and incorporates its tears, markings, and folds into his compositions as part of the buildings’ facades. Evol believes that the character and history of any space is manifest on its surface, and many of his works are narrative or suggestive of the turbulent history of Berlin.

Watch this video of his work:


ERICAILCANE

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(Bologna, Italy)

Ericailcane is an Italian artist, street artist, illustrator, draftsman and sculptor. He makes graffiti worldwide. According to the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago, Ericailcane "belongs to the new generation of European street artists that have revolutionized how to design public space".

The works of Ericailcane are characterized by scientific precision. The artist presents different variations of disturbing animals human-like, in strange contexts, sometimes charged with a social or ecological significance. He often depicts majestic, unpleasant or monstrous figures resembling the Middle Ages. These aquatic or terrestrial animals are often drawn fighting in more or less hostile or adverse environments. The same iconography is used in its refined drawings in his books, in his collages, in her videos and installations, such as the huge puppet presented in 2009 in Bologna for traditional Vecchione, traditionally burned at midnight December 31 in the Maggiore plaza.

Watch this video of the making of a mural in Bastardilla: