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Who's Going to the Elm's Preview on Thursday?, by carlito on Oct 2, 2007 10:16:22 GMT 1, SMALL, MEDIUM and LARGE
International street artists come together in sensational group show of counter culture work.
Friday 5th October - Saturday 10th November 2007
Adam Neate, Anthony Lister, Dalek, Delta, Futura, Jose Parla, Mark Dean Veca, Phil Frost, Ron English, Space Invader, Stash and WK Interact will show work at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms, internationally known for featuring work of some of the world's finest street artists.
Small, Medium and Large will give visitors a unique and unmissable opportunity to see new works by some of the world's leading figures in the radical movement of street art spreading all over the globe as a reaction to the old school contemporary art scene.
Address: Elms Lesters Painting Rooms
1-3-5 Flitcroft Street
London WC2H 8DH
Tube:
Tottenham Court Road
Opening Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 12pm - 6pm
Thursdays until 9pm
Prices: Free
The Elms Lesters Painting Rooms has invited these twelve cutting-edge artists to submit three pieces of work each; one small, one medium and one large, plus a small object for display in a cabinet or on a plinth.
ADAM NEATE
Adam Neate is the most exciting emerging artist in the UK at the moment - a much heralded painter at the forefront of a radical new movement in contemporary art that has seen him bring street art into the gallery space. Over the past five years Neate has left thousands of pieces of work on the streets of London, either hanging on nails or propped against lampposts for people to find. His two and three dimensional paintings use recycled cardboard boxes as canvases - torn, layered and stapled backdrops, warped self-portraits and figurative compositions. Neate's work is technically expert and has won him acknowledgement from Tate, National Portrait Gallery and The National Gallery.
ANTHONY LISTER
Anthony Lister is an Australian born artist who is now living in New York. His work draws references from cartoons and comics and his experiences in the world of graffiti and street art. He is inspired by the underbelly of society, focusing on people who are down on their luck or the wrong side of the tracks. While his subject matter is often uncomfortable, Lister's work has a fragile, wistful quality. He has exhibited widely both in Australasia, Europe and America, as well as recently undertaking a research residency in Berlin.
DALEK
Living in Brooklyn, New York, Dalek's work is vibrant, young, raw and energetic yet sophisticated and refined. His paintings are brightly coloured, featuring creatures he calls Space Monkeys, which are clearly influenced by his teenage years spent growing up in Japan. He says, "The monkey image evolved out of painting graffiti.... trying to find something to set myself apart from the other writers. Dalek's work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and institutions.
DELTA
Netherlands based artist Delta is internationally famous among the counter culture audience. Delta (Boris Tellegen) is a young visual artist who works primarily in the field of graffiti painting. Delta significantly transforms both the traditional presentation mode of visual art, as well as the genre of graffiti painting itself. With his graphic / architecturally inspired and visually spectacular work, he skilfully experiments with a variety of mediums, in order to create his paintings, prints, 3D sculptures and installations. He introduces an alien and idiosyncratic aesthetic into graffiti painting that escapes the common logo-like word IDs. He also significantly transforms the domain of visual art by introducing an abstract and highly architectural style of painting, in a literal sense, to the street, and to the often illicit context of graffiti and street painting. Delta's fine art paintings and sculptures have recently been exhibited in Singapore / Malaysia, London and Italy.
FUTURA
Born in New York in 1955, Futura 2000 is one of the most famous graffiti artists in the world. One of the most unique features about Futura's work was his abstract approach to his style of graffiti. The primary focus of the average subway artist was lettering. Futura displayed a much broader focus; he mastered the ability to create interstellar scenes that set him apart from his peers. Futura's aerosol strokes could be as thin as the fine lines achieved only through the use of an airbrush. In the past his most prolific area of work has been as an illustrator/designer of record sleeves, first becoming involved with The Clash; producing a sleeve for their Radio Clash 7" single and handwriting the sleeve notes and lyrics sheet for their LP Combat Rock. Years later James Lavelle resurrected his career by getting him to produce the artwork for several releases on Mo' Wax records which also led to Futura producing the imagery which has largely defined James Lavelle's UNKLE project. Recently much of Futura's artwork is channelled towards the production of highly collectible toys, and during the 1990s he was heavily involved with the clothing companies such as Subware, Phillie Blunt, Nike, and GFS. FUTURA was part of the two man sell-out PIRATE UTOPIAS exhibition at Elms Lesters in July 2007.
JOSE PARLA
Born in Miami into a family of Cuban exiles, José Parlá moved to Puerto Rico at a very early age before returning to Miami again when he was nine. He currently lives and works in New York, and only recently travelled to Cuba for the first time. His life, like his work, is therefore at once extremely particular and generally reflective of the wanderings of today's urban populations. In the context of these migrations and upheavals, Parlá is concerned with the way that cities function as palimpsests, upon which the experiences of those who pass through them are materially inscribed in decay, in writing, in the well-worn paths of their inhabitants. Parla's work attempts to extract and synthesise fragments of these urban environments in flux and reproduce them using the materials and methods of architecture. Parlá describes the object of his method as segmented realities or memory documents; leading these ideas to form a personal philosophy of his work he calls Contemporary Palimpsests. Each painting bears the name of the location or experience from which it draws its source. JOSE PARLA was part of the two man sell-out PIRATE UTOPIAS exhibition at Elms Lesters in July 2007.
MARK DEAN VECA
Brooklyn based artist Mark Dean Veca's paintings, installations and drawings resemble surreal cartoons and landsapes with inspiration as diverse as 18th century Toile de Jouy fabrics, Mad Magazine, Robert Crumb and the Furry Freak brothers, with popular icons his subject matter. Recent projects include a site- specific installation in Gallery 255, New York, which included a range of limited edition products commissioned by Nike.
PHIL FROST
Phil Frost lives and works in New York. His original work on the streets has grown and matured into exquisitely beautiful complex pieces of art.
Using anything from old barn doors, window panels, leaves, paper, and sticks to feathers, ink, aerosol, gouache and oils, he produces textured multilayered paintings and sculptures that combine flat repetitive organic shapes with his trademark characters, and heavily textured worked areas, reminiscent of tribal shields and artefacts from Melanesia and Australasia. Frost is a sophisticated self taught artist who served his apprenticeship during the 90s creating elaborate installations on the street of New York. The works, which could consist of many panels, were then taken to the selected site under cover of darkness. His notoriety led to a PBS documentary being made about his work in 1994 when he was only 21, and his transition to galleries followed rapidly. He has continued to move back and forth between culture and counter-culture, operating both inside and outside the system, and has exhibited widely in both commercial galleries and museum spaces in USA, Europe and the Far East. At the end of 2005 Phil Frost's work was exhibited alongside artists such as Picasso, Dalí, Magritte and Warhol in the acclaimed exhibition Looking at Words: The Formal Presence of Text in Modern and Contemporary Works on Paper' at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. A major one-man exhibition entitled SEEING IS BELIEVING was held at the Elms Lesters in October / November 2006.
RON ENGLISH
RON ENGLISH has pirated over one thousand billboards over the last twenty years, replacing existing advertisements with his own hand-painted "subvertisements."He revels in taking on the Establishment, tearing down corporate icons, and unravelling social constructs. His works on canvas contain an equally biting commentary while being flawlessly painted in a hyper-real style. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide and his work is included in prominent collections, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris and the Whitney Museum in New York. His work also featured in Morgan Spurlock's film 'SUPER SIZE ME. The film "POPaganda: The Art and Crimes of Ron English" was recently premiered in Edinburgh during the G8 summit. Shot 'guerrilla style' it features ENGLISH as one of the leading figures of the international agitprop movement of artists who paint over billboards and create other art that takes aim at the emptiness of modern culture.
SPACE INVADER
The artist known as SPACE INVADER has been using the iconic image of the archaic computer game character to bemuse and inspire the public in almost every major city in the world. Pieces take the form of mosaics on walls and monuments and pixellated sculptures at street level. The artist's singularly most important goal is getting the icon into as many places as possible and the artist is keen that the project should be fully embraced by like-minded individuals the world over. Several maps are available so that followers can plot where new space invaders have appeared, and the artist distributes stickers so that the image can appear in places beyond his or her reach. His invasion of London was recently completed when he reached his target of installing 100 street pieces. Recent gallery works include 3D wall mounted pieces constructed out of RUBIK cubes, part of a new movement known as RUBIK cubism.
STASH
Stash exhibited his first canvases at a group show in 1983 at the Fun Gallery, followed by his first piece 'The Wall' being published in the renowned graffiti book 'Spray Can Art' in 1985. He painted his last active subway with Zephyr in 1987 and has since showcased work alongside some of the best, including Futura and pop graffiti artist Kaws, as well as performed live shows with the likes of James Lavelle / Mo Wax.
Stash has moved beyond the realms of graphic art and has now firmly established himself as an innovator and influencer in the world of clothing design. He is the entrepreneurial force and founder of the legendary clothing design studio Subware, where he was the first to use simple, sharp and bold graphics - elements of graffiti and the street environment that hadn't been used before. He is also a collaborator on the clothing line Project Dragon and owner of Recon stores in both New York and Tokyo.
WK INTERACT
The work of Frenchman, now New York resident, WK INTERACT is instantly recognisable. During the last fifteen years he has decorated whole tracts of New York's SoHo district with his explosive, dynamic and energetic figures, which appear as if they are permanently on the move; pushing, stumbling and running. His work has been exhibited internationally from America, England and France to Japan and Hong Kong.
Idea Generation: +44(0)20 7749 6853
Liz Barrett: liz@ideageneration.co.uk
Marta Bogna: marta@ideageneration.co.uk
Or contact the gallery on 020 7836 6747 or email for further information
SMALL, MEDIUM and LARGE
International street artists come together in sensational group show of counter culture work.
Friday 5th October - Saturday 10th November 2007
Adam Neate, Anthony Lister, Dalek, Delta, Futura, Jose Parla, Mark Dean Veca, Phil Frost, Ron English, Space Invader, Stash and WK Interact will show work at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms, internationally known for featuring work of some of the world's finest street artists.
Small, Medium and Large will give visitors a unique and unmissable opportunity to see new works by some of the world's leading figures in the radical movement of street art spreading all over the globe as a reaction to the old school contemporary art scene.
Address: Elms Lesters Painting Rooms
1-3-5 Flitcroft Street
London WC2H 8DH
Tube:
Tottenham Court Road
Opening Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 12pm - 6pm
Thursdays until 9pm
Prices: Free
The Elms Lesters Painting Rooms has invited these twelve cutting-edge artists to submit three pieces of work each; one small, one medium and one large, plus a small object for display in a cabinet or on a plinth.
ADAM NEATE
Adam Neate is the most exciting emerging artist in the UK at the moment - a much heralded painter at the forefront of a radical new movement in contemporary art that has seen him bring street art into the gallery space. Over the past five years Neate has left thousands of pieces of work on the streets of London, either hanging on nails or propped against lampposts for people to find. His two and three dimensional paintings use recycled cardboard boxes as canvases - torn, layered and stapled backdrops, warped self-portraits and figurative compositions. Neate's work is technically expert and has won him acknowledgement from Tate, National Portrait Gallery and The National Gallery.
ANTHONY LISTER
Anthony Lister is an Australian born artist who is now living in New York. His work draws references from cartoons and comics and his experiences in the world of graffiti and street art. He is inspired by the underbelly of society, focusing on people who are down on their luck or the wrong side of the tracks. While his subject matter is often uncomfortable, Lister's work has a fragile, wistful quality. He has exhibited widely both in Australasia, Europe and America, as well as recently undertaking a research residency in Berlin.
DALEK
Living in Brooklyn, New York, Dalek's work is vibrant, young, raw and energetic yet sophisticated and refined. His paintings are brightly coloured, featuring creatures he calls Space Monkeys, which are clearly influenced by his teenage years spent growing up in Japan. He says, "The monkey image evolved out of painting graffiti.... trying to find something to set myself apart from the other writers. Dalek's work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and institutions.
DELTA
Netherlands based artist Delta is internationally famous among the counter culture audience. Delta (Boris Tellegen) is a young visual artist who works primarily in the field of graffiti painting. Delta significantly transforms both the traditional presentation mode of visual art, as well as the genre of graffiti painting itself. With his graphic / architecturally inspired and visually spectacular work, he skilfully experiments with a variety of mediums, in order to create his paintings, prints, 3D sculptures and installations. He introduces an alien and idiosyncratic aesthetic into graffiti painting that escapes the common logo-like word IDs. He also significantly transforms the domain of visual art by introducing an abstract and highly architectural style of painting, in a literal sense, to the street, and to the often illicit context of graffiti and street painting. Delta's fine art paintings and sculptures have recently been exhibited in Singapore / Malaysia, London and Italy.
FUTURA
Born in New York in 1955, Futura 2000 is one of the most famous graffiti artists in the world. One of the most unique features about Futura's work was his abstract approach to his style of graffiti. The primary focus of the average subway artist was lettering. Futura displayed a much broader focus; he mastered the ability to create interstellar scenes that set him apart from his peers. Futura's aerosol strokes could be as thin as the fine lines achieved only through the use of an airbrush. In the past his most prolific area of work has been as an illustrator/designer of record sleeves, first becoming involved with The Clash; producing a sleeve for their Radio Clash 7" single and handwriting the sleeve notes and lyrics sheet for their LP Combat Rock. Years later James Lavelle resurrected his career by getting him to produce the artwork for several releases on Mo' Wax records which also led to Futura producing the imagery which has largely defined James Lavelle's UNKLE project. Recently much of Futura's artwork is channelled towards the production of highly collectible toys, and during the 1990s he was heavily involved with the clothing companies such as Subware, Phillie Blunt, Nike, and GFS. FUTURA was part of the two man sell-out PIRATE UTOPIAS exhibition at Elms Lesters in July 2007.
JOSE PARLA
Born in Miami into a family of Cuban exiles, José Parlá moved to Puerto Rico at a very early age before returning to Miami again when he was nine. He currently lives and works in New York, and only recently travelled to Cuba for the first time. His life, like his work, is therefore at once extremely particular and generally reflective of the wanderings of today's urban populations. In the context of these migrations and upheavals, Parlá is concerned with the way that cities function as palimpsests, upon which the experiences of those who pass through them are materially inscribed in decay, in writing, in the well-worn paths of their inhabitants. Parla's work attempts to extract and synthesise fragments of these urban environments in flux and reproduce them using the materials and methods of architecture. Parlá describes the object of his method as segmented realities or memory documents; leading these ideas to form a personal philosophy of his work he calls Contemporary Palimpsests. Each painting bears the name of the location or experience from which it draws its source. JOSE PARLA was part of the two man sell-out PIRATE UTOPIAS exhibition at Elms Lesters in July 2007.
MARK DEAN VECA
Brooklyn based artist Mark Dean Veca's paintings, installations and drawings resemble surreal cartoons and landsapes with inspiration as diverse as 18th century Toile de Jouy fabrics, Mad Magazine, Robert Crumb and the Furry Freak brothers, with popular icons his subject matter. Recent projects include a site- specific installation in Gallery 255, New York, which included a range of limited edition products commissioned by Nike.
PHIL FROST
Phil Frost lives and works in New York. His original work on the streets has grown and matured into exquisitely beautiful complex pieces of art.
Using anything from old barn doors, window panels, leaves, paper, and sticks to feathers, ink, aerosol, gouache and oils, he produces textured multilayered paintings and sculptures that combine flat repetitive organic shapes with his trademark characters, and heavily textured worked areas, reminiscent of tribal shields and artefacts from Melanesia and Australasia. Frost is a sophisticated self taught artist who served his apprenticeship during the 90s creating elaborate installations on the street of New York. The works, which could consist of many panels, were then taken to the selected site under cover of darkness. His notoriety led to a PBS documentary being made about his work in 1994 when he was only 21, and his transition to galleries followed rapidly. He has continued to move back and forth between culture and counter-culture, operating both inside and outside the system, and has exhibited widely in both commercial galleries and museum spaces in USA, Europe and the Far East. At the end of 2005 Phil Frost's work was exhibited alongside artists such as Picasso, Dalí, Magritte and Warhol in the acclaimed exhibition Looking at Words: The Formal Presence of Text in Modern and Contemporary Works on Paper' at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. A major one-man exhibition entitled SEEING IS BELIEVING was held at the Elms Lesters in October / November 2006.
RON ENGLISH
RON ENGLISH has pirated over one thousand billboards over the last twenty years, replacing existing advertisements with his own hand-painted "subvertisements."He revels in taking on the Establishment, tearing down corporate icons, and unravelling social constructs. His works on canvas contain an equally biting commentary while being flawlessly painted in a hyper-real style. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide and his work is included in prominent collections, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris and the Whitney Museum in New York. His work also featured in Morgan Spurlock's film 'SUPER SIZE ME. The film "POPaganda: The Art and Crimes of Ron English" was recently premiered in Edinburgh during the G8 summit. Shot 'guerrilla style' it features ENGLISH as one of the leading figures of the international agitprop movement of artists who paint over billboards and create other art that takes aim at the emptiness of modern culture.
SPACE INVADER
The artist known as SPACE INVADER has been using the iconic image of the archaic computer game character to bemuse and inspire the public in almost every major city in the world. Pieces take the form of mosaics on walls and monuments and pixellated sculptures at street level. The artist's singularly most important goal is getting the icon into as many places as possible and the artist is keen that the project should be fully embraced by like-minded individuals the world over. Several maps are available so that followers can plot where new space invaders have appeared, and the artist distributes stickers so that the image can appear in places beyond his or her reach. His invasion of London was recently completed when he reached his target of installing 100 street pieces. Recent gallery works include 3D wall mounted pieces constructed out of RUBIK cubes, part of a new movement known as RUBIK cubism.
STASH
Stash exhibited his first canvases at a group show in 1983 at the Fun Gallery, followed by his first piece 'The Wall' being published in the renowned graffiti book 'Spray Can Art' in 1985. He painted his last active subway with Zephyr in 1987 and has since showcased work alongside some of the best, including Futura and pop graffiti artist Kaws, as well as performed live shows with the likes of James Lavelle / Mo Wax.
Stash has moved beyond the realms of graphic art and has now firmly established himself as an innovator and influencer in the world of clothing design. He is the entrepreneurial force and founder of the legendary clothing design studio Subware, where he was the first to use simple, sharp and bold graphics - elements of graffiti and the street environment that hadn't been used before. He is also a collaborator on the clothing line Project Dragon and owner of Recon stores in both New York and Tokyo.
WK INTERACT
The work of Frenchman, now New York resident, WK INTERACT is instantly recognisable. During the last fifteen years he has decorated whole tracts of New York's SoHo district with his explosive, dynamic and energetic figures, which appear as if they are permanently on the move; pushing, stumbling and running. His work has been exhibited internationally from America, England and France to Japan and Hong Kong.
Idea Generation: +44(0)20 7749 6853
Liz Barrett: liz@ideageneration.co.uk
Marta Bogna: marta@ideageneration.co.uk
Or contact the gallery on 020 7836 6747 or email for further information
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