For its 4th edition the Urban Week festival returns to the business district of La Defense in Paris from 20 -23 September 2017 with a series of events celebrating street culture from street art, music, sports and food.
Through the project SAATO, 18 international artists are doing live painting sessions: MUG (AUS), BRUSK (FR), VESOD (IT), MONSTA (FR), STOM 500 (FR), BANE&PEST (CH), WISE TWO (Kenya), KALOUF (FR), MR CENZ (UK), BELIN (ES), NEAN (BE), DOES (NL) DEGE (FR), RNST (FR), MOMIES (FR), INSANE 51 (GR), RUSS (FR), MR DHEO (PT).
Photo credit : Celine Neveux for Butterfly Art News
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.
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.
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.
‘Civilization Iteration’ is the first solo exhibition of Chinese artist Xu Zhen at Galerie Perrotin in Paris, showcasing Xu’s important series of works since 2013 when he started a brand in his own name. Iteration refers to the way of achieving a desired result through repeated feedback. The exhibited series shows how an artist, amidst increasing globalization and networking of art, can approach the future of art with his own formula.
As early as 2001, Xu participated in the 49th Venice Biennale, then the youngest Chinese artist to exhibit works at this international art event. Having made a name at 20 as an artist, he has since created a large number of works based on his own consciousness. In 2009 he decided to establish the art creation enterprise MadeIn Company in Shanghai. Since then his works have been produced in a corporate fashion and his “artist” identity has been plunged into the center of controversy. Meanwhile, Xu’s creative focus has begun to shift to the relationship between art and business.
From the “individual artist period” when he concerned himself with the consciousness of identity, to “Xu Zhen brand”, Xu has moved on to repeatedly examine the current culture and transition as a reflection of the tremendous changes in human history over the past decades. Admittedly, the extension of consciousness unleashed by the Internet has eliminated temporal and spatial disparity. Yet, in the process, cultural learning in the traditional sense has been destroyed by information overload, giving way to recurrent cultural stagnation and dysfunctional standards. The information highway makes one feel unreal, and boundaries between meaning, values and reality gradually blur. In the course of time, after endless destruction and reconstruction, the boundless reformulations and iteration are opening up a new paradigm for civilization in the present.
The Rmn – Grand Palais moulding workshop is a little-known source of inspiration and a production workshop for artists searching for the classical canons (Xu Zhen today, Klein 50 years ago, Picasso and Dali 70 years ago, Rodin a century ago, etc.). After the Winged “Victory of Samothrace” inverted on the head of Buddha exhibited at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in winter 2015-16, the Perrotin gallery is currently presenting several works by Xu Zhen, two of which include reproductions from the Rmn – Grand Palais moulding workshop: “Aphrodite Holding Her Drapery” and “Belvedere Torso” from the “Eternity” series.
XU Zhen – Civilization Iteration Galerie Perrotin Until 29 July 76 rue de Turenne 75003 Paris
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