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    in Street Art

    “La Guerra Comienza Aqui” by Escif in Valencia, Spain

    Street artist Escif created a new intervention in collaboration with the Center Delàs d’Estudis per la Pau. The mural ““La Guerra Comienza Aqui” which translates to “The War Starts Here” focuses on the economic component behind all wars: the military industry has much to gain in a climate of conflict and armed violence, and also has the support of governments and financial entities. The former allocate large budget items year after year to acquire weapons and authorize arms transfers to other countries. The vast majority of banks, for their part, finance weapons production in various ways.“That is one of the interpretation that can be made of this mural: There are always those who profit from conflicts like the one we are seeing in Ukraine,” says the Valencian artist. As an example of this, from the pacifist entity they point out how “in the last week, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, we have seen the stock price of the large arms companies, located almost entirely in Northern countries rise”The mural, which has been painted during the last 3 days of February near the old Fe de València hospital, has as its central figure an enormous cloud of smoke like the one that could be generated by a bombardment in a war context, and on its margins you can read the phrase “the war starts here”.At the foot of the piece, feeding that smoke, we find a bill in flames that, according to those responsible for the mural, can also question at an individual level, because as research by the Delàs Center has shown, the financing of armies and weapons requires taxes paid by taxpayers and bank deposits.“The military path, continuing to spend on weapons and fueling the arms race between countries, can only result in war, never peace. As much as the opposite is repeated to us”, concludes Jordi Calvo, coordinator of the entity.Escif utilizes muted color palettes and straightforward motifs to convert walls around his home city of Valencia and other locations throughout Europe into perceptive ruminations on capitalism, politics, and society. He paints sparse scenes and objects with ties to their environment and current events, often relying on humor and wit to convey an underlying message.Active in the Valencian art scene since the late 1990s, Escif is an internationally recognized artist with interventions in recent years in art centers such as the Power Station museum in Shanghai (China, 2016), the IVAM and the CCCC (Valencia, 2017 and 2020), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2018), and participation in events such as the Biennial of Contemporary African Art (Dakar, 2014), OFF Manifesta X (Saint Petersburg 2014), in the “Dismaland” project organized by Banksy in Weston-super-Mare (England, 2015) or the Lyon Biennale (France, 2019). He too received recognition for the 2020 City Hall Failure, which became symbolic of the fight against the pandemic. More

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    in Exhibitions

    A Moving New Play About Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Collaboration With Andy Warhol Explores the Price of Artistic Immortality

    Arriving at London’s Young Vic theater to see a new play about Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, I was thrust into the thick of 1980s New York. Basquiat’s signature SAMO tags were scrawled throughout the theater, while a record-scratching DJ was spinning hip-hop and disco in an effort to recreate the electricity of Studio 54. Onstage sat several reproductions of Basquiat paintings. “That’s the $110 million Basquiat—there,” I whispered to my partner as we sat down.
    It’s hard to talk about Basquiat these days without nodding to the insatiable appetite for his work on the contemporary art market. Written by Anthony McCarten and directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah, The Collaboration—which, after its run in London ends on April 2 will head to Broadway, before being adapted for the Hollywood screen—knows this.
    The drama gives us a fictionalized take on the real collaboration between two titans of art history. It also advances something of a cautionary tale about the toll that the cynical forces of the art market take on artistic expression.
    The action opens at Bruno Bischofberger’s eponymous downtown gallery. The Swiss art dealer and Warhol are taking in work by Basquiat, whose star is rising fast. “He’s mine now,” Bischofberger declares, as he announces a scheme to pair the two artists together in a selling exhibition, a cynical PR stunt which he hopes will generate a healthy profit.
    Jeremy Pope and Paul Bettany in The Collaboration. ©Marc Brenner.
    McCarten has written both artists as reluctant to collaborate, which is a simplification and less than historically accurate—but their hesitation opens the space to establish one of the central tensions of the play: both are disenchanted, in their own ways, with the mercantile machinations of the contemporary art market.
    Paul Bettany’s laconic, whiny Warhol acridly bemoans the art world’s tendency to move onto the next hot thing. Jeremy Pope’s restless, babyish Basquiat, meanwhile, is already fed up with a “so white” establishment and his place within it as a Black man. Why can’t his talent survive on its own without hitching his wagon to Warhol’s star? And how come his graffiti is elevated to art that sells for $60,000 when equally talented contemporaries, such as his friend Michael Stewart, are arrested for defacing public property?
    The titular collaboration itself begins in Andy Warhol’s ascetic studio, conjured in Anna Fleischle’s set design using recreations of Warhol’s Marilyns and Campbell Soup cans to adorn the walls. There, it becomes apparent that the two artists have very different ideas about what art should be.
    Basquiat, who paints with spiritual fervor and believes paintings can be imbued with supernatural powers declares Warhol’s mechanically reproduced works to be bereft of soul. “I’m Dizzy Gillespie, blowing a riff, he’s one of those pianos that plays all by itself,” he shrugs. For his part, Warhol defends his theory of art: “I’m trying to make art that forces you to ignore it, the same way we’re ignoring life.”
    The second act is where the play really comes to life, as the action jumps forward a couple of years to Basquiat’s messy downtown studio. The two men have grown closer. Their walls have come down and a few tender moments relay their character outside of their cultivated public personae. Basquiat’s infectious spirit has disrupted Warhol’s detached performance of himself, exposing his self-loathing and trauma after being shot a few years earlier. 
    Meanwhile, Basquiat is deteriorating. Grappling with his own trauma, a worsening heroin addiction, and the indifference of the art industry, he turns to nihilism, stuffing his fridge full of cash, Cristal, and caviar.
    The climax of the play comes after Michael Stewart is brutally beaten by police in a subway station, and Basquiat begins to paint his friend in an effort to heal him—the work ultimately becomes Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart). When Basquiat finds out that his friend has died from his injuries, he explodes at Warhol, distraught at his art’s inability to resurrect the dead.
    Jeremy Pope in The Collaboration. ©Marc Brenner.
    In a review of Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film, Basquiat, the curator Okwui Enwezor once derided the painter-turned-director for reducing the nuances of Basquiat’s life to a simplified narrative about a Black artist losing a “Faustian wager with fame, money and the white art world.” Schnabel was wrong; Basquiat didn’t sell his soul to the art market. But nearly three decades on, the market has taken it anyway. Basquiat the man has been totally swallowed up by Basquiat the brand. (Perhaps Schnabel’s film even played a role in cementing that brand.) McCarten and Kwei-Armah’s drama gets this. It resurrects Basquiat the man briefly—but doesn’t stop reminding us of what is to come either. 
    The drama comes to a close shortly after Warhol emotionally implores “Jean-Michel Basquiat… I order you to live forever…” There are layers of dramatic irony to this line; we all know Basquiat tragically died of a heroin overdose at 27. We also know that Warhol’s prophecy comes true—but in true Warholian fashion. The exhortation calls back to the first act, when Warhol hits us over the head with a more cynical message: “We’re not painters anymore, Jean. We’re brands. Well, you’re almost a giant brand, and after this exhibition with me you will be too. Then just watch the language change, Jean. People will have to ‘have you’ suddenly… And not you. Not you. Your paintings.”
    The Collaboration doesn’t get into the lukewarm critical reception the pair’s joint show actually received, which played a role in Basquiat’s subsequent decline. The omission is possibly because to today’s audience, that hardly matters anymore. It’s the Basquiat brand that has been immortalized. He is today’s top-selling contemporary artist, and his work is used to sell everything from skateboards to Tiffany’s diamonds.
    As the lights fade at the Young Vic, you hear the voice of Sotheby’s auctioneer Oliver Barker come over the speaker, a snippet of the historic moment in 2017 when that same skull painting I picked out at the beginning of the play sold for “$98 million!” That would be the highest ever price ever for a U.S artist—finally unseating Andy Warhol. It’s haunting.
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    in Exhibitions

    Both Reviled and Revered, La Malinche Has Been Called the Mother of Mexico. A New Exhibition Explores Her Evolving Image

    Temptress and turncoat. Mother of a new nation. Chicana heroine. 
    La Malinche has lived many lives in the cultural imagination since her death in the 16th century, as generations of people have appropriated her image to promote their own political agendas. Now, a landmark exhibition at the Denver Art Museum (DAM) explores the complex legacy of the woman and her impact on artistic culture on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border—the first major scholarly presentation to do so.
    An enslaved Nahua woman who became Hernán Cortés’s interpreter and consort during his conquest of the Aztec Empire, La Malinche proved to be a key actor in one of the defining moments of world history. Whether she did so willingly or not, we don’t know. In fact, there’s much we don’t know about her life. And yet, for five hundred years, La Malinche has loomed large in modern Mexican legend.   
    That much is evidenced by the 68 artworks that make up “Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche,” on view at DAM through May 8, 2022. (Following its presentation at DAM, the exhibition will travel to the Albuquerque Museum and the San Antonio Museum of Art). It’s an important presentation that doubles as a statement unto itself.
    Antonio Ruiz, La Malinche (El Sueño de la Malinche) (1939). Photo: Jesús Sánchez Uribe.
    The show took six years to pull together, with independent curator Terezita Romo working along with Victoria I. Lyall, DAM’s curator of Art of the Ancient Americas, and Matthew H. Robb, chief curator at the UCLA’s Fowler Museum. 
    “This is the first time there’s ever been an exhibition like this,” explained Romo. “Even in Mexico, La Malinche’s story is always connected to Cortés—it’s always about the conquest. This exhibition really pushes that out. It’s more about this young indigenous teenager and what she did in terms, not only surviving, but of actually changing history.” 
    The show is broken down into five sections, each devoted to a different personification of La Malinche’s legacy. The first, “La Lengua” (or “The Interpreter”), examines her role as an interlocutor between the Aztec and Spanish peoples, from Cortés’s first written description of her as “la lengua que yo tengo” (“my tongue”)—an appellative he used instead of acknowledging her name—to posthumous depictions of her as a woman empowered by language. 
    Next comes “La Indígena” (“The Indigenous Woman”), which looks at how the racial designations imposed upon her by conquistadors forms the foundation of her mythology, an otherized object of beauty from a defeated people; and “La Madre de Mestizaje” (“The Mother of a Mixed Race”), an exploration of how, in the wake of the Mexican revolution, the country adopted La Malinche, the mother of Cortés first son, as as a symbol of a new mixed race. 
    Santa Barraza, La Malinche (1991). © Santa Barraza. Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
    By far the biggest section of the show, “La Traidora” (“The Traitor”), focuses on the way La Malinche was depicted throughout much of the 20th century—as a person who turned her back on her people, inviting generations of ethnic cleansing. (Roma points out that the most prominent examples of this depiction “mainly came from men, which is not a coincidence.”) It was during this time that the word “malinchista” was popularized as a pejorative term for someone who prefers foreign cultures to their own. Even today, it’s through that word that most Mexicans know La Malinche at all. 
    “One of the things we wanted to accomplish with the retelling of this story was to have those visitors who are familiar with her story reexamine their preconceived notions and to really understand how pernicious some of those metaphors can be,” said Lyall. “That her name is the basis of a slur that’s quite popular—this is a way of passively emphasizing the sexist and misogynistic view of a woman’s influence.” 
    In response to this period of denigration, La Malinche was reclaimed as an icon of the Chicana movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. This is the subject of the fifth and last part of the show, a section that extends to today, looking at how her image has been embraced by a number of different communities, from feminists to trans activists.
    Jesús Helguera, La Malinche (1941). © Calendarios Landin.
    Despite the myriad ways in which La Malinche’s mythology has been exploited, she’s always resisted reduction, explained Romo. 
    “That has always been the core of what has interested me about her—she was such a complex being,” the curator said. “It’s what makes her so powerful: she elicits these different representations from people.” 
    Thanks to their work, more people will be bringing their own contemporary interpretations to her story. Prior to the opening of the show, DAM launched a series of outreach programs, trying to both gauge the perception of La Malinche in the community and educate people about her story.
    “The best comment we had was, ‘How come there isn’t a Disney princess movie about her?’” Lyall recalled, laughing. “That was definitely not the avenue we wanted to go, but to me it really underlined how, even if our visitors don’t know who La Malinche is, once they hear her story, they are hooked.”
    Jorge González Camarena, Lapareja (The couple) (1964). © Fundación Cultural Jorge González Camarena, AC. Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
    “Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche,” is on view at the Denver Art Museum now through May 8, 2022. It will travel to the Albuquerque Museum from June 11–September 4, 2022, and the San Antonio Museum of Art from October 14, 2022–January 08, 2023.
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    in Exhibitions

    The Artists and Curator Behind the Russia Pavilion Have Pulled Out of the Venice Biennale Amid the Ongoing War in Ukraine

    The artists and curator responsible for the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale resigned over the weekend as the Russian Federation’s offensive into Ukraine continued for a fourth bloody day. The pavilion in the Giardini will now remain closed for the 2022 edition of the prestigious art world event.
    Artists Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov, and the pavilion’s curator, Raimundas Malašauskas, each announced their immediate resignation from the pavilion on social media on Sunday, February 27. The commissioning body behind the pavilion also acknowledged the move on its Instagram, confirming that the pavilion would remain closed for the 59th Venice Biennale, which opens in mid-April.
    “There is nothing left to say, there is no place for art when civilians are dying under the fire of missiles, when citizens of Ukraine are hiding in shelters [and] when Russian protestors are getting silenced,” Savchenkov wrote in an emotional statement posted to Instagram. “As a Russian-born, I won’t be presenting my work at Venice.”
    The news of their withdrawal comes just days after the team behind the Ukrainian pavilion also announced that they had to stop all work on their exhibition due to the invasion. “I would do the same in their place,” Pavlo Makov, the artist who was set to represent Ukraine, told Artnet News, in response to the Russians’ announcements.
    On February 24, Russia invaded the neighboring European nation of Ukraine with a multidirectional attack across the country. The attack has spurred a refugee crisis, causing more than 500,000 people to flee the country in just four days. Those remaining in the country, and especially the major cities, are under constant threat of air strikes.
    “This war is politically and emotionally unbearable,” wrote curator Malašauskas, a Lithuanian who was born in the Soviet Union, in his statement. He added that the “people from Russia should not be bullied or cast-away solely due to their country’s oppressive policies.”
    On Monday, the Italian organization acknowledged the decision in a statement to the press: “La Biennale expresses its complete solidarity for this noble act of courage and stands beside the motivations that have led to this decision, which dramatically epitomizes the tragedy that has beset the entire population of Ukraine,” it said.
    The biennale statement added a condemnation of “all those who use violence to prevent dialogue and peace.”
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    in Street Art

    “Sheikh Hamdan” by Lonac in Dubai, UAE

    Among the palm trees of Al Wasl Road in Dubai, a mural by Lonac, a Croatian muralist, illustrator and painter, overtakes the horizon. He is best known for his large-scale photorealistic murals, with various murals internationally.A new mural at Al Wasl Road is a realistic representation of Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum the son of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Ruler of the Emirate of Dubai. The mural represents Sheikh Hamdan as he glances at Dubai’s horizon, capturing the vision of his father in his eyes and the future ahead of him and his country.Lonac is a highly talented artist whose amazing works can be found throughout his native country and beyond. His signature huge, eye-catching pieces – created with spray cans and brushes – are usually influenced by skateboard culture, comics, graffiti, movies, music, but also current social issues. Strong knowledge of operating painting equipment including his masterful spray can control has allowed the artist to create a recognizable body of work that ranges from monumental realistic pieces to smaller, humorous and often surreal works.Take a look below for more photo of his project in Al Wasl, Dubai. More

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    in Street Art

    Coverage: “Childhood Memories” Group Exhibition at Volery Gallery, Dubai, UAE

    Last February 10th, Volery Gallery opened Childhood Memories, a group exhibition is curated by Jean Claude Geraud, the founder of City of Talents, Toulouse, a contemporary and urban art agency.Childhood Memories brings together the works of twelve contemporary artists from different parts of the world. The artworks represented are emanated from our memories as children, loaded with vivid colours, wistful eyes and universes made of our dreams and childhood cartoons.The exhibition takes the visitors through a trip of reminisces out of the current challenging times and into a hope-filled universe. On show are various styles of paintings ranging from playfully scribbled paintings, flat surfaces as well as Manga and Anime characters taking over the alternate world.The exhibition introduces pronounced international artists with their unique representation of childhood memories to the region. The lineup will include Jonathan Hadipranata; Adam Handler; Andrew Hem; Kai; Jade Kim; Diren Lee; Millo; Keigo Nakamura; Jun Oson; Ryol; Byun Se-hee and Wei Xing. Their artworks will call out the child inside each of us through their endearing characters and naïve sceneries.The exhibition will run until March 8, 2022 at Volery Gallery, DIFC, Dubai, UAE. Gallery hours: 1:00 PM – 7:00 PM.Schedule your visit here.Scroll down below for more photos of the exhibition! More

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    in Street Art

    “The Message” by Pablo S. Herrero and David de la Mano in Valencia, Spain

    Spanish artists Pablo S. Herrero and David de la Mano have collaborated on a new mural in Torrent, Valencia, Spain. The projects is a continuation of their previous mural “The Calm”.“A sailing species brings news from the distance to land and songs of encouragement. It brings omens and the wishes of those left behind. It carries seeds that will take care of the air. It only respond  to the ultimate power.”The pictorical language of Pablo S. Herrero is linked to the code of plant forms. Trees and forests, both murals and paper, are the vehicle for show relationship between the dynamic and the static, individual and community, sustainability and resistance. His activity as a muralist, usually at off-center and marginal spaces, take the suburbs as a paradigm of the rejection that the city causes to large parts of itself.On the other hand, David de la Mano is known for his large dystopian murals featuring human and animal silhouettes and minimalist style. He creates distinctive artworks which are symbolic reflections on humankind and reminiscent of dark fairytales.The single anthropomorphic figures of the artist gather together and unite in an eternal and recurring movement; the individuals become the mass and vice versa, and they are driven by their dreams, ambitions, fears, vices, hopes, and internal conflicts.Take a look below for more photos of the mural More

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    in Street Art

    “Employee of the Month” by BiP in São Paulo, Brazil

    Street artist BiP aka Believe in People just recently finished a new wall in in São Paulo, Brazil. The mural “Employee of the Month” was done on the facade of a 16-story building over the course of six months.With over 100 large-scale murals painted globally, from the United States, Russia and China, to several countries in South America. BiP ’s mural subjects range from historical figures, cartoons, to people in the local communities where is painting.Check out below for more photos of “Employee of the Month”. More