Eliana Willis

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    in Exhibitions

    The U.K.’s First Permanent Immersive Digital Art Gallery Will Open Next Year With a Show of A.I. Space Imagery, Courtesy of NASA

    The U.K. is getting its first permanent immersive digital art gallery. The space, which opens in Coventry in April 2022, arrives as experiential light shows like the Van Gogh Experience are drawing millions of visitors around the globe. Eager to get in on the action, local officials and the national government are backing The Reel Store, which will occupy the former home of the Coventry Evening Telegraph newspaper.
    The Reel Store’s inaugural exhibition will present a project by the fast-rising digital art star Refik Anadol. The show, “Machine Memoirs: Space,” is the product of a long-term collaboration with NASA. Its arrival coincides with Coventry’s term as the U.K. City of Culture and the host of this year’s Turner Prize exhibition.
    To create the work, Anadol uses A.I. to sort and analyze two million publicly available images of space taken by NASA satellites, telescopes, and the International Space Station. Then, his A.I. produces new digital interpretations of the furthest reaches of outer space. The resulting imagery will be presented in a “360 cinematic experience” accompanied by “3D audio,” according to organizers.
    “‘Machine Memoirs: Space’ invites us to dream of an alternative universe where machines collaborate with humans to speculate our existence and create an alternative future,” the artist said in a statement. “This is a hopeful future where machines and humanity, in combination, are agents for healing.”
    The Telegraph Hotel, home of The Reel Store. Courtesy The Telegraph Hotel
    The Reel Store takes its name from the building’s former life (newspaper reels were stored there before being printed). The postwar building is typical of the 1960s architecture that comprises much of Coventry’s city center. The gallery will house a spatially adaptive sound system and an 800-square-meter (8,610-square-foot) fixed projection mapping canvas with 14 4K laser projectors.
    While many emerging artists are working with NFTs, non-commercial spaces with the capacity to display their technically demanding work are few and far between. The support for the gallery, which has the backing of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport and Coventry City Council, is a testament to authorities’ growing belief that such projects can serve as an economic engine for a region.
    “The key for me,” said David Welsh, a cabinet member in charge of the arts at Coventry City Council, “is that although we know it will be a fabulous attraction for visitors, all of our communities in Coventry will also have a completely unique arts venue on their doorstep.”
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    in Street Art

    Asalto Festival 2021 in Zaragoza, Spain

    Zaragoza, 12nd December 2021. Asis Percales, Berni Puig, Dani Hache, Ecosaurio, Letsornot, Maite Rosende, Mina Hamada, Nelio, Olga de Dios and Twee Muizen are the artists who participated in the 16th edition of the Asalto Festival and who have left a series of works that, far of the large format, they have been integrated into the daily tours of the neighbors.These artists have treated with great sensitivity the history of the neighborhood of the Arrabal de Zaragoza and the relationship with its people, as well as the structure and dimensions of the environment and its historical structure.In addition, in this edition the festival has recovered part of its rhythm and reason to be with the participation of citizens, educational centers and associations in workshops or in the creation of some of the works.With this edition, it is sixteen years of Asalto, a pioneering festival that has toured the city with the participation of more than 300 artists.LETSORNOT’s work is a vindication of fountains as a meeting and observation point, where everything happens. The work is conceived to be observed from the circular perimeter of the Fountain, where all the pieces fit together.“If you want to eat cookies, sow wheat” is the ASIS PERCALES mural made with the collaboration of GECO GEC0. This is a sincere tribute to the industrial past of the neighborhoods of Arrabal and Jesús in Zaragoza, to the working-class origin of these neighborhoods on the riverbank. This is a work to get lost in all the details, winks and intersections between the history of the city and the iconography of Asis itself.DANIHACHE pays tribute to jazz, Bob Destiny, the ‘Jazz al Margen’ festival and the musicians and groups related to the movement and origins of Jazz music in the neighborhood, such as the Harlem Blues Brass Band.MINA HAMADA’s work is a poetic intervention in a wall of smaller dimensions than usual. With abstract and organic shapes and a bright color palette it has lit up a narrow street in the neighborhood.The illustrator MAITE ROSENDE, with her flat shapes, has created a story of persecution and friendship through the most significant episodes and places in the neighborhood.The intervention of OLGA DE DIOS in the playground of a school, with its characters and fluorescent colors, has created paths and new places to play for the little ones.The Puerto Rican EKOSAURIO, author of the tallest mural in this edition, is creating a large garden with magnolias, olives and plants from his land and the surroundings of the Huerva River in a building. The artist has also worked with the little ones in the neighborhood, who are very involved in environmental projects.NELIO is the French artist who has painted the facade of the neighborhood health center. With colors full of subtle nuances that change with the passing of the day, it has given new life to a facade of straight and angular lines. In addition, he has intervened in surrounding streets with small mural works in which he has expressed his new artistic concerns.TWEE MUIZEN evoke the mountain as a refuge. The artists Cris and Denís have painted a series of very personal small murals in which they tell us about the refuge they want to be in and that it is in the mountains or in themselves, a source of inspiration for their work.To these, there are 15 artists who are part of the Asalto 15/15 project, which has put 15 residents of the neighborhood in contact with 15 artists from all over Spain to create unique works inspired by their stories. Artists: Begoña Simón, Cranco Estudio, Daniel Martín, Diego Nicolás, Elena González, Emilio López, Héctor Vidal, Javier Garanto, Jorge González – Akosart, Laura Gracia, Marta Boza, Pilar Martín, Sara Escribano, Stella Rubio, Víctor Pastor.The Asalto Festival has the support of the Zaragoza City Council and the collaboration of Tranvías de Zaragoza, Ambar, Montana Colors, Japan Foundation and the Caja Inmaculada Foundation. Check out below for more photos from Asalto Festival. More

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    in Exhibitions

    Idol Worship: The Brooklyn Museum’s Important New Warhol Show Casts the Pop Artist in a Spiritual Light

    Andy Warhol famously instructed an interviewer to “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” But it’s been a long time since the pioneering Pop artist has been seen simply as an empty cipher.  In the years since his death in 1987 Warhol has been reborn many times. The ever-multiplying Andys include social critic Andy, queer Andy, proto-postmodern Andy, reality TV Andy, and commercial Andy.
    “Andy Warhol: Revelation,” currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, homes in on Catholic Andy. Originally organized for the Warhol Museum by its chief curator José Carlos Diaz and overseen in its Brooklyn incarnation Carmen Hermo, the exhibition draws a line from Warhol’s religious upbringing as a Byzantine Catholic (he later took up Roman Catholicism) through the twists and turns of his career to his last major undertaking, a set of over 100 paintings based on Leonardo’s Last Supper.
    This is touted as the first exhibition to explore this aspect of Warhol’s work. However, it is not exactly a new take—the catalogue references both art historian John Richardson’s paean to Warhol’s “secret piety” in his 1987 eulogy and Jane Daggett Dillenberger’s 1998 tome The Religious Art of Andy Warhol. I will modestly add here the chapter I devoted to Warhol’s Catholicism in my 2004 book Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art. Another precursor is Arthur Danto, whose ideas about the transfiguration of the commonplace hover without attribution in labels that discuss Warhol’s sculptures of Heinz Ketchup and Delmonte Peaches boxes.
    Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
    But if the idea of a Warhol immersed in spiritual concerns has been around for some time, newly unearthed materials from the archives of the Warhol Museum have deepened the case. Discoveries include an unfinished film that would have been funded by the Catholic Church, a never completed series of images of nursing mothers, a set of drawings of angels by Warhol’s mother Julia Warhola, as well as religious objects, letters, and clippings that give context to the snippets of text and found images that appear in Warhol’s paintings.
    In addition, the show leans heavily on recent scholarship by Warhol Museum curator Jessica Beck that places Warhol’s late Last Supper paintings in the context of his terrified response to the concurrent AIDS Epidemic. These materials, combined with revelations first made by Richardson of Warhol’s regular church attendance, his financial support of a nephew’s studies for the priesthood, and his participation in a soup kitchen provide a picture of Warhol much at odds with more familiar representations of the artist as an indifferent societal mirror or cultural sieve.
    Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    The show opens with a wealth of materials that underscore the degree to which religion saturated Warhol’s childhood. On display are holy cards, religious statuettes, and crucifixes from his home, several religious paintings borrowed from his childhood church, and even a painting by a very young Warhol in which his childhood living room is presided over by a prominent cross.
    The show then builds its case with thematic sections that consider other aspects of Warhol’s debt to Catholicism. One set of works and ephemera consider his rather problematic relationship with women. These include his obsession with Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, whose portraits have long been seen as counterparts to the Byzantine icons of his childhood; his friendship with Candy Darling, Warhol superstar and transgender icon; and his near assassination by Valerie Solanas, the Factory hanger-on and author of the SCUM Manifesto (a piquant acronym for the Society for Cutting up Men). More surprising are drawings and photographs depicting breastfeeding mothers. Inspired, presumably, by the countless Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and Child, these were intended for a never realized painting series.
    Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    Another section documents Warhol’s 1980 visit to the Vatican and his five-second meeting with Pope John Paul II amid a throng of other worshipers. The exhibition ties this to a number of Warhol drawings of huge crowd scenes. A section documenting his borrowings from various Renaissance paintings (and pointing toward the late Last Supper paintings) tries to make the case for Warhol as a latter-day Renaissance man. A section of an unfinished film originally destined for a 1968 World’s Fair in San Antonio is comprised of poetic images of the setting sun accompanied by a crooning voiceover by Factory chanteuse Nico. Commissioned by the Catholic Church, it bears a striking resemblance to Paul Pfeiffer’s 2001 film Study for Morning after the Deluge, in which the rising and setting sun also becomes a metaphor for the cycle of life and death.
    But most crucial for the exhibition’s argument is a section titled “The Catholic Body.” Here the show ties the essential carnality of Catholicism, a religion whose doctrines, art, and literature center on very literal representations of the “Word Made Flesh,” to Warhol’s bodily obsessions and his conflicted existence as a gay man in a faith that condemns homosexuality.
    Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    Two works introduce these ideas. Richard Avedon’s iconic photograph of Warhol’s bared torso riven with the scars left by Solanas’s attack becomes, in this context, a modern-day version of the many Renaissance representations of the martyr Saint Sebastian, whose muscular arrow riddled torso has made him a gay icon. A lesser known Warhol silkscreen painting from 1985-86 titled The Last Supper (Be a Somebody with a Body) also presents a juxtaposition of religious and homoerotic imagery, this time by layering images of the Christ from the Last Supper and an image, clipped from a newspaper ad, of a buff, half-dressed body builder.
    Which brings us to the exhibition’s centerpiece. “Andy Warhol: Revelation” pivots on Warhol’s Last Supper paintings. Arranged like a horseshoe, the layout leads one through the above-mentioned material to a voluminous quantity of Last Supper imagery. The Last Supper paintings were commissioned in 1984 by art dealer Alexander Iolas for display in a space in Milan across the street from Leonardo’s masterwork. But Warhol went far beyond the confines of the original commission. He collected multiple images of the Last Supper, including a lenticular version and a very kitschy sculptural rendition documented here in polaroid photographs. And he used the imagery in many ways, including on a series of punching bags that were collaborations with Jean Michel Basquiat and in paintings emblazoned with logos or comprised of fragments of Leonardo’s mural.
    Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    At the Brooklyn Museum, two full-scale versions of Warhol’s Last Supper are presented in an almost chapel-like space. They spread over opposite walls separated by a bench where, on the day I visited, visitors were obediently sitting in contemplative silence.  This is a reminder of the ambiguity embedded in this work—and for that matter, all of Warhol’s work. Depending on which Andy they are highlighting, critics have tended to locate Warhol’s imagery on a scale that runs from blank irony to heartfelt sincerity. The Last Supper paintings pose a particular problem. Are they just another pop culture image, not unlike the like soup cans, dollar signs, or portraits of Chairman Mao, appropriated precisely because of their ubiquity and banality? Or are they vessels full of personal meaning? In an essay referenced in the catalogue, Jessica Beck makes the case for the latter, arguing that these late paintings were created in an atmosphere suffused with the threat of AIDS.  Many of Warhol’s friends and associates were dying of the disease. In response, Beck maintains that Warhol “gave AIDS a face—the mournful face of Christ.”
    And yet, as the exhibition now moves down the other prong of the horseshoe layout, closing the show out with works that provide a Catholic context for some of Warhol’s more familiar imagery, one can’t help feeling that interpretation is a little too pat. The exhibition consciously resists the tendency, evident both in the Richardson eulogy and the Dillenberger study, to present an overly sanctified Warhol free of the bedeviling contradictions that continue to make him such an elusive subject. But at the same time the approach here seems overly hermeneutic.
    Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    By that I mean that texts and images are treated like hidden messages to be deciphered as one might the theological exegeses embedded in Renaissance religious paintings or medieval manuscripts. Such an approach seems to dismiss the deliberate insouciance of Warhol’s own commentaries as well as the obvious ironies that underlie so many works. And it makes it necessary, to use just one example, to reframe the overtly blasphemous and sacrilegious references in Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls, screened in full here, as modernizations of Christ’s embrace of outcasts and misfits.
    It seems more true to the Last Supper paintings to acknowledge that they exist, like all Warhol’s works, in a continuum between irony and sincerity, partaking simultaneously of both. Warhol could be both vulnerable and cruel, spiritual and profane. Perhaps it might have helped to delve a bit more into the contradictions between the carnal and the spiritual inherent in Catholicism itself. The section “The Catholic Body” starts to do this, but doesn’t touch on the homoerotic overtones of Catholic stories and imagery that would have fired Warhol’s imagination. This is, after all, a religion whose central image is a near naked man on a cross.
    Warhol was not alone in finding the mix of ritual, sensuality, and homoeroticism in Catholicism irresistible, even as its official dogma condemned his sexual being. Robert Mapplethorpe, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and David Wojnorowicz are three gay artists whose work is increasingly being considered in terms of their Catholic upbringing. Of particular relevance to this exhibition is the way that Wojnarowicz used the face and body of the crucified Christ to denote suffering and to evoke society’s callous disregard for the ravages of AIDS while also roundly condemning the Catholic Church’s complicity in the crisis.
    Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
    Moving on from the Last Supper sanctuary, the show winds down with sections that bring us some of the more familiar aspects of Warhol’s work. In light of what has gone before, these now also take on a Catholic tinge. The “Skulls,” “Shadows,” “Electric Chairs,” and “Death and Disasters” evoke Warhol’s death obsession. A section titled “The Material World: What We Worship” offers a nod to his valorization of consumption, now seeing Warhol as the chronicler of “the desires, hopes, and prayers of modern life.” One series, “Guns, Knives, and Crosses” from 1981-81, makes a particularly ambiguous statement about the relationship of religiosity and violence.
     Whatever its shortcomings, this is a thought-provoking and deeply researched show. And, given the way it foregrounds the tension between Warhol’s homosexuality and his Catholic faith, it must be added that it is also a brave one. These days it is easy to raise the censorious hackles of cultural arbiters from both ends of the political spectrum. By presenting a frank acknowledgement of the complexities of sexuality and faith, Andy Warhol: Revelation opens up new avenues in the often fraught discussion of the relation of art and religion.
    “Andy Warhol: Revelation” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum, through June 19, 2022.
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    The Biggest Survey of Bob Dylan’s Visual Art to Hit the U.S. Is Now Open in Miami—See Images Here

    “Got to hurry on back to my hotel room where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece,” Bob Dylan sang in 1971. “She promised that she’d be right there with me when I paint my masterpiece.”
    It’s unclear if the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter ever got around to that masterpiece, but if he did, it’s almost certainly on view now in “Retrospectrum,” a survey of Dylan’s artistic output from the late 1960s through to today, which opened last month at Florida International University’s Frost Art Museum in Miami.
    More than 180 paintings, drawings, and sculptures make up the show, much of which has never been seen by the public before. And that’s what makes the show special: The artist is one of the most famous humans on the planet, but its offerings will be largely new to audiences, especially in the U.S. The show marks the first time the artworks have been shown together stateside. (A previous version of the show was held at the Modern Art Museum in Shanghai in 2019.)
    Bob Dylan, Rainy Night in Grand Forks (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
    “Seeing many of my works years after I completed them is a fascinating experience,” Dylan said in a statement about the retrospective (a straightforward reflection from a man who, now in his sixth decade of making idiosyncratic music and art, rarely offers them). 
    The insight gets even more Dylanesque from there: “I don’t really associate them with any particular time or place or state of mind, but view them as part of a long arc; a continuing of the way we go forth in the world and the way our perceptions are shaped and altered by life. One can be as profoundly influenced by events in Morretes, Brazil, as they can be by the man who sells El País in Madrid.” 
    Much like his music, Dylan’s visual oeuvre spans a broad swath of styles and genres. But whereas his nasal voice would give away even the most out-there tune as a Dylan original, no such clue connects his artwork. From painted depictions of cramped urban cityscapes (think Edward Hopper) and yawning Western vistas, to a series of sculptural gates made from welding together a hodgepodge of metal materials, they don’t necessarily seem to be from one man’s hand.
    Bob Dylan, Night Time in St. Louis (2020). Courtesy of the artist.
    “I think what distinguishes Dylan as a songwriter is his willingness to take disparate literary and musical strains and incorporate them into his unique vision. You can see the same kind of open-mindedness and willingness to experiment in Dylan’s visual work,” the exhibition’s curator, Shai Baitel, told ARTnews last month. (Baitel is the artistic director of the Modern Art Museum Shanghai and organized Dylan’s 2019 show there.) 
    “I am convinced that creativity, no matter in which field or context, comes from the same deep place within us,” she went on. “And the difference in its articulation through different art forms only serves to deepen our understanding of that creativity.”
    Also on display is Dylan’s newest body of work, a series of paintings inspired by famous movie scenes called Deep Focus. 
    “All these images come from films,” the artist explained. “They try to highlight the different predicaments that people find themselves in. Whether it’s James Cagney or Margaret Rutherford, the dreams and schemes are the same—life as it’s coming at you in all its forms and shapes.”
    Bob Dylan, Abandoned Motel, Eureka (2015–16). Courtesy of the artist.
    “Retrospectrum: Bob Dylan” is on view now through April 22, 2022 at the Frost Art Museum in Miami.
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    Artist Simone Leigh Reveals Her Plans for the Venice Biennale, Including a Major Symposium of Black Thinkers and Makers

    The title of the U.S. pavilion at next year’s 59th Venice Biennale will be “Simone Leigh: Grittin“—and come fall, the artist will host a major convening, “Loophole of Retreat: Venice,” for the occasion.
    The new details about the eagerly-anticipated exhibition—Simone Leigh is the first Black woman artist to represent the U.S. at the prestigious event—were revealed today by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the pavilion’s commissioner, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston.
    “This will be the first time the U.S. Pavilion is entirely dedicated to the experiences and contributions of Black women,” Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s director, said in a statement. “Global in its research and references, intergenerational and collaborative in its lines of inquiry, Leigh’s exhibition will leave an indelible mark on all who visit the pavilion.”
    And while many in the art world will make a pilgrimage to Venice for the biennale’s opening in April, Leigh hopes audiences will book a return trip in the fall. Just as she did during her 2019 solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the artist is holding an event—this time a three-day affair—that takes its name from the 1861 autobiography of the formerly enslaved Harriet Jacobs, who christened the crawlspace she lived in after gaining her freedom a “loophole of retreat.”
    Simone Leigh, Las Meninas (2019). Photo: Farzad Owrang, courtesy of the artist and the Cleveland Museum of Art, © Simone Leigh.
    Featuring performances, film screenings, and conversations, as well as an international slate of scholars, artists, and activists, the symposium is organized by Rashida Bumbray, director of culture and art at the Open Society Foundations, with curatorial advisors Saidiya Hartman, a professor at Columbia University in New York City; and Tina Campt, professor at Brown University in Providence, R.I.
    Key themes include maroonage, magical realism, and medicine. The event “continues [Leigh’s] work of making Black women’s intellectual labor more visible,” Bumbray said. “‘Loophole’ will elevate a global conversation on Black feminist thought in order to nurture the intergenerational and interdisciplinary connections between Black women thinkers and makers.”
    The artist’s inspirations reflect the African diaspora, from 19th-century West African art to colonial history, and will become all the more resonant in Venice, given its long history of intercontinental trade and cultural exchange. Her presentation will feature a new series of figurative sculptures representing Black women in bronze and ceramic, including works that Leigh is making at a Philadelphia foundry.
    Simone Leigh. Photo: Shaniqwa Jarvis.
    “Most artists who have the opportunity to work in large-scale bronze will make a cast in clay that then the bronze foundry will scale up to cast into bronze,” explained Eva Respini, the ICA’s chief curator. “Simone is working with the clay models at 100 percent scale, which is incredibly rare…her hand touches everything, and the result of her hand being present in all stages of the process of making is that the works are extremely resonant in person. The attention to every detail, every surface, translates to works that are once personal and human.”
    The exhibition’s title is meant to evoke the dual meanings of “grit,” both the physical quality of sand but also the spirit of resolve and determination even in the face of obstacles. More specifically, “grittin” is an African American Vernacular English term that means adopting a posture of protection. For Leigh, it represents the perseverance and stoicism embodied by her figures, as well as the earthen materials she uses to make them.
    Following the conclusion of the biennale in November, the pavilion’s contents will be packed up and shipped to Boston, where the ICA will host Leigh’s first museum survey, opening in 2023 and subsequently touring to other venues across the U.S.
    Leigh signed last week with New York’s Matthew Marks Gallery after an abrupt split from mega-dealer Hauser and Wirth last month.
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    in Street Art

    “Web 2.0” by Ludo in Paris, France

    Street artist Ludo is back with a new mural in the streets of Paris, France. The mural entitled “Web 2.0” features a variation of his famous BTC Flower but instead of the bitcoin symbol, it displays an infinity sign with a tombstone below in which the words “R.I.P. Web 2.0” is written.Ludovic Vernhet, known by the name Ludo and sometimes even referred to as Nature’s Revenge, is an artist born and raised in Paris.His is all about connection between nature, animals and new technologies. It’s all about the world surrounding us. Mixing robotic and natural elements, Ludo questions us about our reality. Without condemning he is putting in highlight topics such as global warming, capitalism, globalization, ecology and the place of the human being among nature. More

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    in Street Art

    “The Way to a Dream” by Mutus in Pinsk, Belarus

    An experienced Belarussian muralist Mutus created a huge mural painting “The Way to a Dream” in his native town Pinsk (Belarus). The impressive mural painting on a facade of a 10-storied building became a part of a large-scale project “Traditions for the future”.The painting is dedicated to the ancient trade route from the Baltic to the Black Sea. And modern Belarusians, who confidently follow their dreams, relying on a rich historical and cultural background.Mutus’ monumental painting is a part of an ambitious art-project named “Traditions for the Future”. The project “Traditions for the Future” is a series of motivating murals in Belarusian cities and towns. Every picture reflects the values of entrepreneurship and personal initiative through the prism of Belarusian legends and history. The project is being implemented by Belarusbank and the street-art team “Urban Myths”.It’s emblematic that Pinsk has become the first town taking part in the project. This small town has been always renowned for its ambitious and adventurous residents. A lot of people who have changed the world were born here.International trade has always been actively developing in the town on the large navigable river Pripyat. And in IX-XII there passed the legendary international trade route “From the Varangians to the Greeks”, which had a great influence on the development of the entire region. It was a very risky undertaking for ancient times to sail along rivers from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Travelers had to have a hefty dose of courage and adventurism. The mural “The Way to a Dream” depicts a decisive figure on a drakkar (a boat of the Scandinavian type). This is a modern young man who is confidently making his way into the unknown for his dreams. In his very image there is something “dreamlike”: he connects day and night, past and present; his sail is heaven. The character throws coins “for good luck” into the water and they turn into stars in the night sky in the reflection of the sail.The huge mural on the wall of a 10-storied house was created in just 10 days. The authors are the Belarusian artist Mutus and his assistant Siarhei Rysakou. Mutus is already a fairly experienced muralist, he is known for his romantic street paintings, where realistic images and author’s metaphors are intertwined.Check out below for more photos of the mural project. More

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    in Street Art

    “Dreamers” by Gleb Kashtanov in Mazyr, Belarus

    An extremely vivid mural painting “Dreamers” was created by a Belarusian muralist Gleb Kashtanov in Mazyr, Belarus. The mural on a facade of a 9-storied building in a new actively developing district of town became the continuation of the project “Traditions for the Future” supervised by Belarusbank and the street-art team “Urban Myths”.The plot of the mural is based on the author’s rethinking of an ancient Mazyr legend about the origin of the world and locals. The characters of the mural painting are modern children, who are about to start building their own future. Their real world is intertwined with ancient legends and fairytales.The monumental painting “Dreamers” is a part of an ambitious art-project named “Traditions for the Future”. The project “Traditions for the Future” is a series of motivating murals in Belarusian cities and towns. Every picture reflects the values of entrepreneurship and personal initiative through the prism of Belarusian legends and history. The project is being implemented by Belarusbank and the street-art team “Urban Myths”.Mazyr became the second town of the project. This town has a unique Belarus hilly terrain with deep ravines and its history is full of mysteries. Nowadays Mazyr is a dynamically developing industrial town, where there are a lot of children and young people.The author of the mural painting tried to convey images of unique nature, legendary ancient history of the town and confidence in the future. Before starting work the organizers consulted a local historian. One of the legends, told by the historian, inspired the author to create the mural.Here’s the legend:“A long time ago, when the Sun was a God and walked from West to East, the first land began to rise from the waters of the sea. That time, migratory birds were resting on the hills, and they brought the seeds of rare plants to Mazyr. These plants are now found in local ravines.One day, the Sun was going across the sky and heard a fantastic song. It was sung by Milavica (Belarusians call Venus, a goddess of love and beauty, Milavica,). This charming girl sailed on a boat in the sea between the hills. The Sun fell in love with Milavica and followed the sounds of the song. The first “Paliashuki” (residents of Paliessie) were born from the love of the Sun and Milavica. Descendants of those people now live in Paliessie, and the Sun moves from East to West.”The mural “Dreamers” became the biggest for Gleb Kashtanov in his career. Gleb is an ambitious and promising muralist from Vitebsk (Belarus). He has a professional education in the art sphere and develops his personal style in street art. More