 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
|
Blu is the pseudonym of an Italian artist who conceals his real identity. [1] He was born in Senigallia. He lives in Bologna and has been active in street art since 1999.
Blu's nomadic spirit peaked in 2005. From the end of that year, Blu spent most of his time jumping from place to place in self-guided travels, linking his itineraries to the festivals to which he was invited. During that time, he collaborated with Ericailcane and several artists from Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras in a festival in Managua called "Murales de Octubre." During the festival, he painted a wall, significant in the history of South American murals, on the Avenida Bolivar, where, in 1979, Victor Canifrù celebrated the Sandinista revolution. [2] This mural was then dubbed "Hombre Banano" (Banana Man) by the locals, referring to the protest of the workers on banana plantations. [3]
The following year, from October 2006 to December 2006, he returned to Central and South America for a long circuit of murals that included Mexico City, Guatemala City, Managua, San José (Costa Rica), and finally, Buenos Aires (Argentina). He was followed during the trip by filmmaker Lorenzo Fonda, who documented the experience and turned it into the documentary film Megunica, for which Blu created a series of animated segments using digital software. The film also includes the first documented painted stop-motion animation by Blu. [4] A year later, he was again in South America, in São Paulo, Brazil, participating in the festival "A Conquista do Espaço" (Conquering Space). On that occasion, he came up with a new interpretation of the "Christ of Corcovado" of Rio de Janeiro. In Blu's version, Christ is literally submerged by tons of guns and rifles. From the fall of 2007 to the spring of 2008, he lived in Buenos Aires, creating a video called Muto [5] (Silent), which received the Grand Prix 2009 from the Festival of Clermont-Ferrand. [6] This video is composed of hundreds of paintings on walls, made throughout many streets of Buenos Aires, and, frame by frame, creates more than seven minutes of an animated mural.
In 2009, Blu started his umpteenth tour around South America, visiting Bogotá for the festival "Memoria Canalla," then Montevideo, Uruguay, back to Buenos Aires, and, for the first time, Lima, Peru, where he painted the entire façade of an historical building in the central Avenida Arenales. In this huge mural, Blu seems to reinterpret the history of South America, a continent that has been violated by both ancient and modern conquistadores.
In 2013, he participated in the Bienal de Arte Urbano (BAU) in Cochabamba, Bolivia. [7]
In 2008, Blu accepted an invitation from the Deitch Gallery in New York to paint the exterior of their Long Island location. After being invited by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles to paint the exterior wall of the museum for its "Art in the Street" exhibition, its director Jeffrey Deitch ordered the resulting mural to be whitewashed the day after it was finished, probably due to its political content. The mural represented two rows of coffins, each draped with a one-dollar bill in place of the American flag. [8]
In 2007, Santa's Ghetto, [9] a London-based art collective that organises annual happenings of painting performances and print trade fairs, invited Blu to a festival that took place in the West Bank. Blu was part of a group of artists, including Banksy, Mark Jenkins, Ron English, Swoon, and Faile who painted on the wall around Bethlehem that separates the West Bank from Israel. [10] On a watchtower border, Blu painted a figure of a person trying to tear down the walls with his finger. [11]
In 2010, Blu was invited to Vienna to paint a mural at the Danube River harbour near Albern in the city district of Simmering. First suggested in 1923 as one possibility for the expansion of Vienna's harbour facilities, Albern was selected for realisation by the German Reich Ministry of Transport (Reichsverkehrsministerium) in 1939, a year after the "Anschluss" of Austria to Nazi Germany. The project was to serve as a logistic node of a future geo- and biopolitical order, designated for the transshipment of grain from the annexed or economically colonized regions of eastern and south-eastern Europe to the heartlands of the German Reich. For the construction of the harbour basin and its five granaries between 1939 and 1942, the Nazi regime employed forced labour. Realized on one of the granaries, Blu's mural called upon the overdue historical and social commemoration of the place's charged history and the unknown fates of the forced labourers who built it. The commissioned piece was destroyed in autumn 2013 in the course of renovation works. [12] [13]
In 2007, Blu went to London for the first time, where he made many pieces around Camden Town and Willow Street and at the former headquarters of the art gallery website Pictures on Walls. [14] That same summer, he took part in a two-man exhibit with Ericailcane at the Lazarides Gallery. [15] The following year, the Tate Modern [16] presented an exhibition on the phenomenon of street art and invited Blu, [17] along with JR, [18] Faile, Sixeart, and Os Gêmeos [19] e Nunca, to paint its entire main façade. [20]
Blu worked in Germany on many occasions between 2006 and 2009, mostly in Berlin and always around Cuvrystraße in a multi-ethnic neighborhood called Kreuzberg. Thanks to his participation in several of the festivals "Backjump" [21] and "Planetprozess," [22] he had the opportunity to create some of his works, one of which was painted in combination with gigantic photos by the French artist JR.
In 2006, during one of these trips, Blu made his first digital animation from images painted directly on a wall, a technique that would be a recurrent theme of many of his future videos, such as "Muto."
In consultation with Blu, the two murals at Cuvrystraße were covered with black paint in 2014 by a group of people as a sign of discontent with the city's urban development policies in the area. [23]
Italy, above any other country, can boast of having the majority of Blu's graffiti, both illegal and legal. Among the public projects worth noting are the façade of PAC [24] (the Contemporary Art Pavilion) in Milan, finished in 2008; the murals in that city's Bicocca and Lambrate train stations, done in 2008 and 2009; three editions of "Spina Festival" in Comacchio (2005, 2006, and 2007); and two editions of "Fame Festival a Grottaglie [25] " (2008 and 2009). In this last one, Blu completed a video animation with the New York-based artist, David Ellis. Blu has also taken part in many editions of the festival "Icone [26] " in Modena and in Ancona's "Festival Pop Up" in 2008, where he painted, along with Ericailcane a gigantic silos next to the harbor waterfront. Other Italian cities where Blu has left his mark are varied, among which are Prato, Florence, Grosseto, Turin, Ancona, Rovereto, Verona and Pesaro. In Bologna, he wrote most of his first works because of his studies at the city's university. In 2016, he deleted all murals painted in Bologna due to the decision taken by the municipality, which made an exhibition trying to profit from Blu's graffiti without his permission. [27] [28]
Blu has also painted in several "Centri Sociali", places that are between squats and self-managed cultural centers. In Bologna his work is visible at XM24, TPO, Livello 57, Crash; in Rome at Forte Prenestino and Collatino; in Milan at Cox 18 and Leoncavallo and in Pisa at Cantiere San Bernardo.
Blu has frequently visited Spain. At the festival "Segundo Asalto" in Zaragoza, he, along with the artists San, Eltono, [29] Nuria, [30] and Nano, painted a mural of a colossal minotaur picking up an astonished man. Blu's murals can also be found in Valencia, Linares, Madrid and Barcelona. In Barcelona's Barrio Carmelo neighborhood, Blu took part in the 2008 edition of the festival "The Influencers". [31] With the global economic crisis looming, Blu painted a threatening shark whose skin is completely covered in euro bills.
Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based street artist, political activist, and film director whose real name and identity remain unconfirmed and the subject of speculation. Active since the 1990s, his satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. His works of political and social commentary have appeared on streets, walls, and bridges throughout the world. His work grew out of the Bristol underground scene, which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. Banksy says that he was inspired by 3D, a graffiti artist and founding member of the musical group Massive Attack.
Zhang Dali is an artist based in Beijing.
Thierry Noir is a French artist and muralist based in Berlin. He is considered the first artist to paint the Berlin Wall in the 1980s. He created brightly-colored paintings across large spans of the Berlin Wall and some of these original paintings can still be seen on surviving segments of the Wall in art collections and on the East Side Gallery. Noir's work and style are now considered iconic, and Noir is also regarded as one of the forerunners of the street art movement as a whole. He continues to create murals worldwide in cities including London, Los Angeles, and Sydney.
Street art is visual art created in public locations for public visibility. It has been associated with the terms "independent art", "post-graffiti", "neo-graffiti" and guerrilla art.
OSGEMEOS are identical twin street artists Otavio Pandolfo and Gustavo Pandolfo. They started painting graffiti in 1987 and their work appears on streets and in galleries across the world.
Since the 1980s, the area surrounding the Sydney inner west suburb of Newtown, Australia, including the suburbs of Newtown, Enmore, Erskineville, Camperdown and St Peters, has been known for its wide range of prominent graffiti and street art on walls. The public visual art in the Newtown area consists of a variety of styles and methods of execution, including large-scale painted murals, hand-painted political slogans, hand-painted figurative designs, spray painted semi-abstract designs "tags"), and other stylistic developments such as stencil art and street poster art, "Yarn bombing", and sculptural items cast from plaster and other materials.
Benjamin Flynn, known professionally as Eine, is an English artist based in London.
Stephen J. Powers is an American contemporary artist and muralist. He is also known by the name ESPO, and Steve Powers. He lives in New York City.
Victor Ash, also known as Ash, is a Copenhagen-based artist originally from Paris, France. Ash primarily works on canvas, lithography, and sometimes installations. He has exhibited regularly in various museums and galleries around the world since the late 1980s.
Vhils is the tag name of Portuguese graffiti and street artist Alexandre Manuel Dias Farto.
Francisco Rodrigues da Silva also known as "Nunca" is a Brazilian graffiti who uses Native Brazillian themes in his art. His artist name "Nunca" means "Never" in Portuguese.
RISK, also known as RISKY, is a Los Angeles–based graffiti writer and contemporary artist often credited as a founder of the West Coast graffiti scene. In the 1980s, he was one of the first graffiti writers in Southern California to paint freight trains, and he pioneered writing on "heavens", or freeway overpasses. He took his graffiti into the gallery with the launch of the Third Rail series of art shows, and later created a line of graffiti-inspired clothing. In 2017, RISK was knighted by the Medici Family.
Stormie Mills is a street/visual artist operating out of Perth, Western Australia. Mills' portfolio has been published in two books, Proximamente (2008) and Dwi Yma (2013).
Lorenzo Fonda is an Italian filmmaker and multi-media artist and artist based in Italy. He is recognized for his eclectic use of multi-media techniques and often surreal storytelling. He became a naturalized United States citizen in 2021.
Woozy is the tag of Greek street artist and muralist Vaggelis Hoursoglou. He has been painting large-scale murals for nearly 20 years in a number of countries around the world. His work has been a crucial aspect in the graffiti scene in Greece.
Art in the Streets was an exhibition held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles from April 17 to August 8, 2011. Curated by its then-director Jeffrey Deitch and associate curators Aaron Rose and Roger Gastman, it surveyed the development of graffiti and global street art from the 1970s to the present, covering the cities of New York City, the West Coast, London, and Sao Paulo with a focus on Los Angeles. It was supposed to travel to the Brooklyn Museum from March 30 to July 8, 2012. The exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum was cancelled because of financial difficulties.
Nina Pandolfo is a Brazilian street artist.
Astronaut/Cosmonaut is a mural by the French street artist Ash in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin.
Pier Paolo Spinazzé, also known by the pseudonym Cibo, is an Italian antifascist and street artist who uses murals to cover neo-fascist graffiti in Verona. He began using his murals in this way after one of his classmates was killed by a group of neo-fascists; his art typically depicts Italian cuisine.
RABI is a first generation American visual artist of Puerto Rican and Polish descent from Los Angeles, California. He is known for being part of the artist collective, CYRCLE. RABI's works can be seen in public and private collections including that of Shepard Fairey, Ari Emanuel, Sean Combs, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, MOCA Detroit, Bishop Museum in Hawaii, MGM Grand in Las Vegas, The Art of Elysium,the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, and the Urban Nation Museum Berlin.
