All posts by butterfly

The Best Street Art in Marrakech

August 27, 2017 butterfly

The Moroccan city of Marrakech has stood for close to a thousand years, a city of history and culture. Also known as the Red City, Marrakech is one of the most evocative places in the world, a place to engage the senses from the vibrant colourful souks, enticing smells and spices, relaxing hammams to the architectural wonders from exquisite gardens to ornate mosques and minarets.

So it’s no surprise that the city is becoming more and more active with the street art scene, and more and more international artists are creating public art both in the old city and the French quarter, known as Gueliz. Hidden away, down unassuming side streets and inside cafes and galleries, it’s not that easy to discover Marrakech’s emerging street art installations. So we give you some tips to discover the best public art installations in town and surrounding areas.

On the side of a building on Avenue Mohamed VI, a large portrait of Marrakchi ‘Aziz’ by Beikrich greets visitors exiting the main train station. In collaboration with the Montresso Art Foundation, German artist Hendrik Beikrich pays homage to the disappearing tradesmen in Morocco, at least in the manner that they continue to work today, including zellig artists, masons, shepherds and more. Beikirch has a fascination for everyday people, those who are often photographed in the souks but never really honoured.
Rue des Vieux Marrakchis is host to one of the leading contemporary and urban art gallery David Bloch with immersive installations from international graffiti artists like REMED, Lek, Sowat, MIST.

In terms of Art festivals, since its creation in 2004 the Marrakech Biennale has grown amongst the top 20 biennales in the world, and Street Art being an inherent part of the cultural programme. In the rooftops of the souks in the Medina, Bahia Palace area, and the walls around Gueliz, the new part of Marrakech, a dozen of murals by international artists can be found wandering through the narrow colourful streets: Mad C (Germany), Dotmaster (UK), Giacomo RUN (Italy), Dag Insky (France), Kalamour (Morocco), Alexey Lucas (Russia), LX.ONE (France), Lucy McLauchlan (UK), Remi Rough (UK), Sickboy (UK) and Yesbee (UK).

Marrakech also feature the largest mural in Morocco by French artists POES and JO BER, a monumental 360 sqaure meters in the the college Tariq Ben Ziad, the largest mixed college with 2200 children. Both artists wanted to revisit the infamous board game “The game of Life”, designed to look like a video game. The Master of the game with robotic features invites the children through different seasons in a playful world, with joyful characters, and share a creative vision of life based on knowledge, sign of cultural openness and that the student aspirations and ambitions are supported regardless of their background or gender.

Last but not least the hidden gem of Marrakech is Jardin Rouge (from the Montresso Art Foundation), an artistic residency and private heaven for contemporary and street artists to experiment monumental works (with visits on appointment only).

All photos by Butterfly Art News

Paris

Paris: Elzo Durt – Colors & Glory

August 16, 2017 butterfly

With the 10th year anniversary of the music label Born Bad Records and the release of a monograph entitled “Complete Works”, Belgian graphic designer and illustrator Elzo Durt is showing 13 years of illustration in an exhibition called ‘Colors & Glory’ at the Gallery du Jour in Paris

With more than a hundred exhibitions to his credit, dozens of projects and album covers, Elzo Durt is one of the most prolific and recognizable illustrators. After a good decade spent imposing a heavy and abrasive style made of creepy and psyche collages within the punk and techno scenes of Brussels, he has, in a few years, colonized the imagination of the French rockers by becoming the main illustrator of Born Bad Records and creating his own label, Teenage Menopause.

The exhibition starts in a psychedelic kitchen from the 1950s, giving the visitor a feeling of drunkenness but also inviting him into a psychedelic universe to discover one hundred and thirty works (posters, record covers …) including 15 of its most iconic pieces as well as some previously unseen works and ends in a gothic-punk church of the future.

As the ultimate fan of underground music, Elzo, and his Parisian friend Francois Froos, launched their own music label Teenage Menopause Records in 2011, dedicated to punk and techno.
A monumental fresco of 1.80 meters by 4 meters bringing together forty small paintings into a futuristic pope is dedicated to his friend Froos.

But Elzo Durts’ universe does not resonate only with these two styles or movements, as he multiplies borrowings and winks, drawing from the world history of graphic design and posterism: from military propaganda of the twentieth century Sci-fi comics; Art Nouveau to Russian constructivism; or from the psychedelic art of the 1960s and 1970s to the flyers of the late 1980s announcing the first raves.

View the full set of pics here

Elzo Durt – Colors & Glory
Galerie du Jour
Rue Cinquapoix Paris

Paris, Shows

Paris: John Giorno

August 11, 2017 butterfly

Cahier d’Arts in Paris presents a series of prints of the works by New York artist John Giorno, as well as four new painting poems until the end of August.

Part of the New York underground scene in the mid sixties, John Giorno was the main actor in Andy Warhol’s first film ‘Sleep’ in 1963. He was also very close to the ‘beat’ movement and to William S. Burroughs. His main concern at the time was to make poetry accessible to popular culture.

In 1965, he founded Giorno Poetry Systems, a non-profit organization that started several musical groups and also became a label that published about forty albums. In 1968, he created Dial-a-Poem, a mass telephone service (in fact the first of its kind) that offered poems to the people who dialed the number and received millions of calls. Giorno has published a dozen collections of poems, as many albums, video works, and has given many performances since the past forty years.

A portfolio of recent works of the artist is illustrated in the last issue of the magazine Cahiers d’Art 2016-2017 and presented at the Palais de Tokyo.

View the full set of pics here

John Giorno – Cahier D’Arts
Until end of August
14-15 rue du Dragon 75006 Paris

London, Shows

London: Ashley Bickerton – Ornamental Hysteria

August 6, 2017 butterfly

NewportStreet Gallery is currently showing a retrospective of works by US artist Ashley Bickerton.

‘Ornamental Hysteria’ spans more than three decades of Bickerton’s career and features 51 works, including a significant display of new and previously unexhibited pieces. It is the artist’s first UK show since 2009 and runs throughout all six spaces at Newport Street Gallery.

Bickerton moved to New York in 1982 and after working as a painting assistant to Jack Goldstein, he emerged as a key figure on the newly exploding East Village art scene. Within the context of the culture of commodification sweeping America he rose to prominence as part of an amorphous movement that was branded ‘Neo-Geometric Conceptualism’. Alongside artists such as Haim Steinbach and Jeff Koons, Bickerton endeavoured to reframe the practice of art production in response to the new, seductive mechanisms of desire at work in society.
Bickerton abandoned New York in 1993, eventually settling in Bali, where he still lives and works.

Throughout his career, Bickerton has challenged what we consider or define a painting
Multidisciplinary artist, Ashley Bickerton uses a variety of medium, from photocollage, digital image, paint and sculpture to create technical assemblages on the themes of opposition and duality: representation and reality, creativity and commodity, nature and artifice, idyll and apocalypse.

The gallery 1 presents a critique of contemporary consumer culture and the commodification of the ‘art object’ via steel and aluminium wall-mounted ‘Culturescapes’ from the ‘Logo’ and ‘Non-Word Word’ series.

The monumental 5 Snake Heads in the Gallery 2 showcasing a five-bodied, technicoloured serpent is a parody of the mythological figure of a self portrait of the artist.

Colourful paintings like ‘Smiling Woman’ based on distorted and retouched photographs, illustrate models, family members and friends with heavy make-up as an overtly satirical and lurid vision of life on a generic Pacific / Caribbean island.

Galleries 3 and 4 feature Bickerton’s ‘Sea’ and ‘Landscapes’ – offering a tragic view of the devastating impact of man on the ecosphere.

View the full set of pics here

https://vimeo.com/215645083

Ashley Bickerton – Ornemental Hysteria
Until 20 August 2017
Newportstreet Gallery London

Paris, Shows

Paris: Okuda – The Dream of Mona Lisa

August 1, 2017 butterfly 1 Comment

Anna Dimitrova from Adda Gallery and Montana Gallery and Valériane Mondot from Taxie Gallery join forces to celebrate a collaborative new gallery ADDA & TAXIE and present a monographic and the first Parisian exhibition of Spanish artist OKUDA SAN MIGUEL called ‘The Dream of Mona Lisa’.

Inspired by the city of Paris, according to Okuda, the enigmatic Mona Lisa dreams of human figures and muses of the great classic masters. Being a creator and contemporary master, Okuda interprets these icons through his own surrealist prism using intense psychedelic colors and geometric harmonies.

Blending rainbow geometric landscapes with organic shapes, headless animals, figures, and personal iconography, his works produces mental stimulation and visually pleasing content. The artist continuously tries to balance the gray scale with his vibrant palette, using colors as a symbol of life and nature and the latter as a symbol of cement, death, dust and the material of classic sculptures.

In his latest series, Okuda San Miguel expresses his own vision of what the human being is made of. Humans are confronted with their roots, between its natural and ideal part, represented by trees and different types of animals and the capitalist society, represented by bricks. Showing us the world where human beings and animals are created equal, the artist distils his own personal vision of God. This conceptual research is the result of his journeys and continuous contact with different environments. The artist sums up the contradictions between existentialism, universe, infinite, freedom, modernity and the meaning of life as an inextinguishable thirst.