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    “Our Feelings” OKOKUME x CASETiFY

    CASETiFY, the global tech accessory brand loved by artists, Gen Z, and Hollywood celebrities announced its collaboration with Spanish artist Okokume in a capsule collection featuring Cosmic Girl, the character of her own creation in Los Angeles.CASETiFY is a brand and home to the first and largest platform for customized tech accessories. Created with the highest-quality materials and most cutting-edge designs, CASETiFY’s products empower self-expression by turning your personal electronics into highly designed, stylishly slim, drop-proof accessories. Known for tapping top artists, big celebrities and creatives for its Co-Lab program, CASETiFY gives brands and individuals the opportunity to share their unique visions with the world. With 18 retail shops and growing, CASETiFY Studio provides a one-stop, visual retail experience where customers can customize their accessories on the spot.Okokume, the pseudonym behind Laura Mas Hernandez, is best known for her iconic character. Cosmic Girl, the pink-haired spirit with turquoise skin is the universe’s messenger who emphasizes the importance of protecting the environment. She travels in space and tends to planets in need by restoring them to their former glory. Through her, Okokume has exhibited in Tokyo, UTOPIA (Ginza), REALITY (JPS Gallery, Tokyo), and other major cities worldwide such as K11 Art Space in Hong Kong.Okokume’s Lowbrow-inspired style of painting reflects the influence of Japanese manga, American cartoons and street culture. Her gleeful and colourful works transport the audience into the universe of Cosmic Girl and her companions, spreading positive messages they believe in. Okokume’s cheerful and positive style is met with much popularity, making her one of the fastest-growing contemporary artists.The name of the collection is “Our feelings”. Okokume wanted to represent all those childhoods affected by wars, where she appeared on TV as a metaphor for changing their roles. And where butterflies symbolize the lives that are lost at sea. She believes that as an artist, she needs to externalize what affects her most, positively or negatively.The Okokume x CASETiFY Collection includes several phone case designs featuring Cosmic Girl and Dino, and are available for iPhone and Android Models. A number of designs will also be available for AirPods cases, magsafe chargers, air tag holders and iPad cases. More

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    WILDSIDE Yohji Yamamoto x CASETiFY

    CASETiFY is a global lifestyle brand and home to the first and largest platform for customized tech accessories. Created with the highest-quality materials and most cutting-edge designs, CASETiFY’s products empower self-expression by turning your personal electronics into highly designed, stylishly slim, drop-proof accessories. Known for tapping top artists, big celebrities and creatives for its Co-Lab program, CASETiFY gives brands and individuals the opportunity to share their unique visions with the world. With 18 retail shops and growing, CASETiFY Studio provides a one-stop, visual retail experience where customers can customize their accessories on the spot.CASETiFY, Gen Z, and Hollywood celebrities announced its first collaborative collection with WILDSIDE YOHJI YAMAMOTO, the latest conceptual project from the Japanese artist.WILDSIDE YOHJI YAMAMOTO is an original brand that reconstructs elements extracted from the essence of Yohji Yamamoto into a casual taste with the keywords of military, work, and sports, and incorporates them into every detail. A unisex collection that has been customized more modernly and updated with functionality. Its tech accessory collection is inspired by the concept of the new project under the same name by the artist. The lineup includes a design with the popular iconic SKULL & ROSE on the entire surface of the case, as well as simple style options with a logo, all based on Yohji Yamamoto’s symbolic black colour and incorporating edgy artwork in a CASETiFY-like taste.In addition to the best-selling mirror and impact case that can withstand a drop from a maximum height of 2.5 meters, the lineup will be available in a vegan leather case type that is eco-friendly, with variations to match each design. The collection also includes a wide range of other tech accessories and lifestyle items such as AirPods cases, Apple Watch Bands, and water bottles that fit well with the WILDSIDE YOHJI YAMAMOTO apparel collection. Products will range between USD$30 and USD$85 depending on the model and design options. More

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    Tania Marmolejo “Owning My Symbols” Limited Edition Print – Available December 29th

    Dominican Swedish American painter Tania Marmolejo and Volery Gallery have collaborated with ArtPort for her latest limited edition screenprint entitled “Owning my Symbols”. The artwork is a part of Marmolejo’s recent exhibition at Volery Gallery, Dubai — Master and Commander which is dedicated to the bravery of Iranian women in their fight to break the old constraints that have trapped them in a particular place and cultural time.The giclee + screenprint comes in an edition of 45 and measures 61 x 72 cm.Influenced by her Scandinavian and Caribbean heritage, Tania Marmolejo explores gender and identity issues. Her paintings juxtapose the intimate and personal with the monumental, creating large-scale paintings of ambiguous female facial expressions.Born in 1975, Santo Domingo, Marmolejo currently lives and works in New York.Owning my Symbols will be available on 29 December 2022, Thursday. 7PM HK Time (7AM NYC, 4AM LA, 9PM Melbourne, 12PM UK, 8PM Tokyo) at ArtPort website.ArtPort is a publishing house established in 2020. ArtPort supplies limited high-quality editions and prints by artists from the new contemporary art wave. Created around the theme of travelling, ArtPort aims to have people on board, offering them a journey through the art world and an easy way to bring it to their homes. Each edition is a unique and exclusive collaboration between ArtPort and leading contemporary artists. More

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    “Pointman – River Warrior” sculpters by Futura set to be unveiled in Singapore and Bali, Indonesia

    Futura is known for being one of the first graffiti artists to ever depart from lettering in the early 1980s and turn to abstraction. The artist grew up in New York. A teenager in the 1970s, those years which saw the rise of the graffiti and urban art movement, he quickly took an active part in this period of great artistic emulation and soon made his own mark thanks to his unusual style. Futura, therefore, holds a unique status in the history of graffiti, both as a pioneer and iconoclast of the movement.From the turn of the 80s, he developed the use of canvas in his practice, exhibiting alongside artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring or Kenny Scharf. The key elements of the style which we associate with Futura today were already there: clouds of colour with subtle variations, fine lines that seem to be barely scratching the surface, and above all this astonishing fluidity that gives his work such a unique atmospheric mood. A personal touch and virtuosity make Futura an essential figure among urban artists today. After fifty years of career, he continues to be a painter with an ever-fertile creativity. One who was able, with his lofty abstract style, to stay relevant through the years and to free himself of reductive categories.Futura has unveiled two sculptures titled Pointman – River Warrior, set to be unveiled in Singapore and Bali as a social commentary on pollution. To demonstrate the gravity of Indonesia’s dire pollution crisis, a problem that has long been a central concern for Futura, the Pointman statues will be made out of repurposed waste materials collected together with Potato Head from the Singaporean/Bali waterways.  In Singapore, 14,300 black and white grocery bags were collected by environmental advocates, Sungai Watch, for the creation of Pointman. In Bali, everything from motor oil bottles to discarded water gallon lids sourced by a community organisation, Yayasan Kakikita were used. The Pointman statue in Singapore was at National Design Centre and another one, on a much larger scale, was unveiled in the courtyard of OMA-designed Potato Head Studios in Bali.Futura’s sculpture is an extension of Potato Head & OMA’s “N*thing is Possible” exhibition in Singapore Design Week, where they collaborate with world-renowned talents i.e Kengo Kuma, Max Lamb, Faye Toogood, and Andreu Carulla, amongst others, to showcase a visual representation of the hospitality brand’s efforts to a zero-waste lifestyle.Take a look at more images below and check back with us soon for more updates. More

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    Osona Artimur Festival in Barcelona, Spain

    Osona is a beautiful countryside area in the north of Barcelona, Spain. The local authorities bet for a large format urban art festival where 19 new murals and artistic interventions have found a new home in the walls of 5 different villages of the region this last October.Osona Artimur gathered top artists like Zoer, Ana Barriga, Satone, Eloise Gillow, Daniel Muñoz, and Isaac Cordal among other urban art top names create 19 new artistic interventions for the 1st edition of the Osona Artimur Festival curated by B-Murals in the countryside of Barcelona, in order to produce identity portraits of each different small town, from a contemporary approach and point of view. In this rural context, muralism and street art stand up as a unique mixture of tradition and innovation.Take a look at more images below and check back with us soon for more updates.Ana Barriga Oliva in Sant Julià de Vilatorta.Wedo Goas in Prats de Lluçanès.Satone in Sant Bartomeu del Grau.Isaac Cordal in Sant Bartomeu del Grau.Nano4814 in Alpens.Contemporary and abstract pieces shutter the traditional aesthetical criteria, looking for new portraits of local identities, as the murals of Zoer, Satone, Ana Barriga, Rosh and Nano4814 display. Additionally, rural contexts become new places for researching, innovation and promoting art.Invited artists: Zoer, Ana Barriga, Satone, Nano4814, Luogo Comune, Isaac Cordal, Rosh,  Alberto Montes,  Jan Vallverdú, Marta Lapeña, Eloise GillowArtists selected by open call: Twee Muizen, Sergi Bastida, Wedo GoasArtists working on participatory processes: Daniel Muñoz, Chu Doma,  Alessia Innocenti, Mateu Targa, ZosenPhoto Credit: Monika Pufflerova & Fer Alcalá. More

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    Coverage: “Master and Commander” Solo Exhibition by Tania Marmolejo at Volery Gallery, Dubai, UAE

    Last December 8th, Volery Gallery opened Master and Commander, a solo exhibition by Swedish-Dominican artist Tania Marmolejo.Tania Marmolejo works primarily with painting, portraying her experience of womanhood through figures of women with ambiguous facial expressions. Flat surfaces, soft strokes, and vivid oil colours, are the main characteristics of her work. With a background in graphic design and illustration as well as academic training in Fine Arts. Her work is inspired by German and Flemish art of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, and the Figurative and Abstract German Expressionism. Influences of Scandinavian art are also apparent in her choice of colours and minimalist subject matter.For Master and Commander fourteen paintings are on show, dedicated to the bravery of Iranian women in their fight to break the old constraints that have trapped them in a particular place and cultural time. The works subtly investigates and portrays references that have been used historically to demonstrate women’s virtue or the lack of it.These symbols include ripe fruits, flowing hair, bare skin, and scenes of animal interactions. Women with stories pouring out of their eyes, delivering their emotions through their facial expressions, their figures are captured in fields and indoor spaces playing and questioning these motifs, representing resistance to pre-made fantasies of femininity and womanhood, making them the masters and commanders of their destiny.The exhibition will run until January 3, 2023 at Volery Gallery, DIFC, Dubai, UAE.Gallery hours: 2:00 PM – 7:00 PM.Schedule your visit here.Scroll down below for more photos of Master and Commander exhibition. More

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    “Under the Skin” art by David de la Mano in the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium

    David de la Mano was born in Salamanca in 1975, where he graduated in Fine Arts before focussing on Public Art for his PhD at the University of Valencia. From 1993 onward, De La Mano has worked extensively in urban public space, and developed his trademark style during numerous international projects. Relying predominantly on harsh contrasts of black and white, his reductive and increasingly emblematic paintings centre around narrative and symbolic figuration. David de la Mano is a contemporary artist known for his meticulous brushwork, his knack for large scale, almost systematic use of black and white, and his minimalist human silhouettes. With his original training in sculpture, he has focused his interest on public art, to which he has naturally and immediately integrated urban art, becoming one of the most important artists in this discipline.His work is made up of characters taken from great poetry that do not leave anyone indifferent. Through each piece, he works to transcribe his vision of the world around him, in the most personal and symbolic way possible. Between shadow and light, playing with shapes, contours and contrasts, David de la Mano gives birth to a world of perfect balance, where human beings and nature, always intrinsically linked, merge and then stand out, in perpetual motion. In addition, it stands out for its exploration of new spaces, supports and materials such as open or invisible spaces, permanent and ephemeral supports, and diverse materials such as urban furniture, or elements of nature.The Spanish artist with a very unique universe has nothing more to demonstrate of his virtuosity, and each of his frescoes around the world confirms it. For Mehdi Ben Cheikh, director of Galerie Itinerrance, “David de la Mano’s work is as relevant on the street as it is in galleries, and it retains all its power from one place to another”. The artist has developed numerous projects in Spain, Norway, Italy, Taiwan, the United States, Poland, England, France, Finland, Tunisia, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Portugal, Holland, Germany, etc … and exhibits his works in private homes or in art galleries around the world. David de la Mano’s painting focuses primarily on the importance of social ties, primarily through the representation of human figures evolving in groups, often facing an obstacle or threat. Take advantage of the evocative power of silhouettes to stimulate the imagination of your viewers.The project “Under the Skin” was finished painting and mounting on December 5 on the third floor of the European Parliament in Brussels, created with MDF and assembled from different parts that generate scars in each of its limits.The work shows a growing sequence of confrontation and I accompany its presence with this poem by Miguel Hernández:“…For freedom I detach myself with bulletsof those who have rolled his statue through the mud.And I break free from my feet, from my arms,of my house, of everything.Because where some empty sockets dawn,she will put two stones of future lookand she will make new arms and new legs growin the cut meat.They will sprout winged sap without autumnrelics of my body that I lose in each wound.Because I am like the felled tree, what a sprout:because I still have life.”“Man Lurks” 1937-1939Miguel HernandezTake a look at more images below and check back with us soon for more updates. More

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    John Fekner – Detective Show – Bio Editions Book Release

    The latest release from UK publishing house Bio Editions is a photography book from John Fekner, entitled ‘Detective Show’. Featuring a foreword by legendary art critic, Carlo McCormick, the title explores the formative steps of street-art-as-installation, transporting readers back to 1970s Queens, New York, and shining a light on an era of authentic, artistic freedom.Detective Show maps the conception and creation of a strikingly unique outdoor urban art event organised in 1978, spanning the breadth of an unloved park in Jackson Heights, Queens, NYC. Contributors included Fekner himself, Don Leicht, and numerous acclaimed artists, including Richard Artschwager and Gordon Matta-Clark.Fekner ultimately decided to invite those he shared studio space with in the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center to join him in hiding works across the park, including Richard Artschwager, Gordon Matta-Clark, Len Bellinger, Don Leicht, Frances Hynes, Claudia DeMonte and Karen Shaw among others.Envisioned as a ‘beyond the visible’ hide-and-seek art game of sorts, with visitors given clues and urged to seek out the works strewn across the concrete expanses or even hidden among the trees, Fekner’s objective was simply to create thoughtful interaction with surroundings through art, to the benefit of the public, young and old alike. The end result, he hoped, would provide what he thought of as ‘the magic of discovery by happenstance’.Careful to ensure that the painted and sculpted contributions worked in harmony with the space, Fekner notes he “had to place some restrictions on the artists – no monumental stuff that might disturb the park.”Interspersed between photographs documenting the scope and joy of the show, artists fondly recall a period of artistic freedom that felt unencumbered by the trappings of commercial art.“It’s hard to remember what an exciting and different time 1978 was in the art world. It was pre-PR machines, hype, mega-money, business plans,” notes DeMonte.“For a few weeks in the spring of 1978, about two hundred kids were exposed to original artwork in their own backyard, by some of the most renowned artists of the day,” adds Dave Santaniello, “and that experience changed their perception of their environment forever.”Fekner himself was particularly pleased by the low-key nature of the show’s impact: “The Detective Show was quite unlike current street art festivals with their spectacular large murals, bright colours and street fair atmosphere.“The show was quiet and removed; distanced from the usual New York art world locations and audiences. Extremely low key, it was a temporary art installation about subtlety, nuance, and the magic of discovery by happenstance.”Many of the artists involved in the show have since gone on to become revered names within the contemporary art world, some were renowned before they took part, and others went on to teach, or lead ‘ordinary’ lives. This only serves to further act as tribute to a show that was created with solely the art and those who would experience it in mind, a great unifying cause for creators that urged others to look for beauty in hidden places.In notable contrast to today’s large scale mural-style street art festivals, this 84-page book charts an ideologically-pure reinvention of the urban landscape for the benefit of all, made without corporate sponsorship or underlying motives.Like the show itself, the book – which includes numerous lovingly-printed photographs documenting the event, flyers, newspaper clippings & other ephemera, and written recollections by many of the artists themselves – is a love letter to the innovation of art within public spaces.Two editions of the book, including those featuring limited-edition prints, will be available from 5pm on 1st December 2022.In addition to the first Edition of 450, Bio will also release a special edition of 78, signed by John Fekner. These are sold along with a limited edition gicleé print with silkscreen varnish, signed and numbered by the artist.Detective Show will be available to order via Bio Editions’ website. Photography courtesy John Fekner / Bio Editionswww.bioeditions.com More