There’s currently a massive survey exhibition of work by New York-based Swiss artist Urs Fischer at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. It’s a great show and among the works are these massive cut-outs of the walls between three of the museum galleries.
We caught a crew of graffiti artists painting a new piece of artwork on one of those graff-covered wholesale delivery trucks that seem to be everywhere in New York’s Chinatown and Lower East Side (LES). We’re not sure, but we think the graffiti writers might be Tats Cru (if anybody know, send us an email). The truck they were painting was parked on Essex Street in the art-fashion part of the LES.
Alright, we’re here in Times Square, New York City, and here they are … lots more fresh photos, including close-ups, of the massive, epic street art building-takeover and billboard by French artist JR. The the giant-eye billboard artwork is the crowning touch on a project that’s been in the works the past few weeks. The images of people faces on the building itself has been a work in progress in since early May, when the artist set up a photo-booth and studio truck in Times Square and then pasted images of volunteer models on the sidewalk and building nearby. The giant eye on the billboard can be seen from quite far away, as photos below and in our previous post show.
French street artist JR he has put the finishing touches on and unveiled another massive eye image, part of the Inside Out Project, on a billboard atop a building in Times Square. Pictures below. JR has been taking photos of people and pasting these to the sidewalk and around a building there for the past few weeks. We’re heading over to Times Square on our bike now to take close-up pictures. We’ll be live-blogging from Times Square and posting more photos in a few minutes.
This recent street art by the artist “WhIsBe” in New York City is charged with provocative, offensive imagery and is a striking piece of commentary on corporate brands and the military. The artwork is a mash-up of the McDonald’s corporation’s red-headed clown mascot Ronald McDonald and its branding with fascist militaristic images (Hitler moustache, Nazi salute and uniform). This is one of the more exciting, fresher pieces of street art we’ve seen in a long time. Seriously, keep it up, WhIsBe! If this wheat-paste street artwork is still up, you can find it on a wall on Thompson Street between Spring and Broome streets in SoHo.
The big sound board set up at the Bowery Ballroom in New York always looks so nice lit up in the darkness of the club. If we could, we’d buy one of these and mount it on the wall of our office as a piece of ready-made art and at night we’d turn off the office lights just to see the sound board it in its light-emitting glory.
Partner in crime Moritz was wearing such a superdope graphic t-shirt on a recent night out on downtown New York City, that we asked him to model it for us. The tee design is a brilliant, whimsical image with a kind of retro English, possibly Edwardian quality to it, like something we’d expect to see on the cover of an album by a band like the Walkmen or Bombay Bicycle Club.
Last week we paid another visit to FOAM, the wonderful, influential photography museum in Amsterdam, where there is currently a major exhibition of photographs by Stephen Gill. Included in the show were several images from the British photographer’s “Covered or Removed” series, a collection of photos of urban spaces in the U.K. where graffiti has been scrubbed or painted over. Great stuff.
Since the the 2011 reactor-meltdown disaster at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan, we’ve seen a lot of anti-nuke street art pop up in Tokyo, especially around Shibuya and Naka-Meguro. Often the artwork is in the form of a large sticker that features the line-drawing image of a little girl and the international nuclear symbol.
We really love this large piece of wheat-paste street art by the intensely prolific and ambitious French artist JR. An extension of his global Inside Out Project, the eye is a recurring image of JR’s work and his various projects. Usually his street artworks show a pair of eyes, but this one is just a single eye. This one is on Thompson Street near Grand Street in SoHo, in downtown New York.
The spire was finally added to the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site in New York City last week. The photos below show the Tower, with its newly added spire, as seen from SoHo. The addition of the spire was a momentous occasion, a milestone charged with the symbolism — the building is now 1,776 feet tall, which is an important date in America’s history of independence. The event makes the Freedom Tower the tallest building in the western hemisphere.
We’re at the second annual Frieze Art Fair in New York City today, an ambitious event started by influential U.K. art magazine Frieze. Below are some pictures of the venue, including pix of the dramatic entrance to the long, snaking tenets that house the event, which we got to via a ferry up the East River, and our Fair Map.
We were in Paris a few months ago when some ad agency friends in the French capital turned us on to a new and ground-breaking food magazine and restaurants guide that is blowing up in France at the moment. The magazine is called “Fooding,” and it’s providing a fresh approach — in historically conservative culinary France, at least — to how people think and write about restaurants, dining and food. Its timing coincides with a generational and cultural shift in France (a rebellion, some might say) in how food is prepared and presented within the restaurant dining experience. It’s a big deal because classic French cuisine is amazing, but firmly established and thus, until recently, relatively strict, rigid in its ways, hidebound to traditional methods. Though primarily in French, Fooding (or “Le Fooding”) has a lot of reviews translated in English. We really like the look of the magazine, its layout, design, photography, illustrations and graphics, as the photos from the 2013 edition of the guide below show. And we really appreciate the craft and design of an actual printed magazine, especially now, at a time when so many us consume magazine content online or digitally and — seemingly almost as a reaction to that — he art of the the small-run print magazine is showing a resurgence.
