PRESS
RELEASE
GRAFFITI AUTHORIZED IN LONG STREET
Urban/Pop
9 September – 4 October 2008
34 LONG FINE ART presents an exhibition of contemporary Urban/Pop art in their gallery at 34 Long Street, Cape Town, from 10am Tuesday 9 September to Saturday 4 October 2008.
A graffiti wall will be installed inside the gallery. Visitors are invited to participate to their heart’s content, with no fear of intervention by authorities. Work on the wall will be posted on the gallery website daily.
Mass production, kitsch, comics and advertising have provided inspiration for Pop artists the world over ever since Andy Warhol. Simultaneously, Street art has developed into a multifaceted ‘movement’, flourishing on the nervous energy of graffiti and stencilling, spray-can art, skateboard culture, hip music and urban fashion.
This exhibition explores the intersections where Pop and Street collide.
Often a form of dissent against control, Street art has, not surprisingly, been regarded as unlawful in most organised communities, travelling a difficult road into the world’s art galleries. Recent controversy in Cape Town’s press highlights the continuing opposition, mostly founded ignorance, this art form faces. In comparison Pop art had a smooth trip.
The two combine in an exciting, vibrant visual language loosely known as Urban/Pop, its artistic merit recognised on its own terms, its lingo and its codes widely employed by artists who explore the complexities of contemporary life in their work. Early exponents of Street art like Keith Haring and Jean Basquiat paved the way for the current wave of practitioners like Banksy in England, who now commands enormous prices for his work, and his acknowledged predecessor, Blek le Rat.
London’s Tate Modern is staging the first major public museum display of Street art in 2008, featuring works by six internationally recognized artists on the outside walls of the building. Locally 34 LONG FINE ART is breaking new ground with this show which includes work by Blek le Rat, Nick Walker, D*face, and other international stars.
Blek le Rat started out stencilling rats all over the streets of Paris in the 1980s, and is acclaimed as a pioneer of contemporary street stencilling, a quick and easy way to reproduce images endlessly. Its evolution into a complex and delicate artistic language is largely attributed to the work of Blek.
Nick Walker is one of Britain’s graffiti pioneers. His career spans more than twenty years and he has adopted stencilling as a mode of treating iconic figures with wry humour in public places.
D*face, a London-born artist, and Asha Zero from South Africa, are members of the younger generation of graffiti artists with growing international reputations. Surprise is a key ingredient of Street art, and in keeping with this element, the show will contain works by hot new local artists
including Daniel Ting Chong.
Skateboarding is revered as a quintessential, almost mythical Street art activity. A selection of skate decks with pop art images by Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, D*face, Norman Catherine,
Motel and Asha Zero will be on exhibition.
Roelof Louw, a seasoned Cape Town artist, presents new editioned silk-screen prints in which his graphic idiom is perfectly adapted to produce the emotionally confusing images for which he has become well known in London.
