Urban Art Association

Permission To Paint, by Leonard Street Gallery on Dec 3, 2007 16:05:07 GMT 1, 14th December to 11th Jan

Leonard Street Gallery is pleased to present the graffiti duo Herakut who combine multiple techniques of both spray can and traditional painting methods in their highly stylised street works in our upcoming exhibition Permission To Paint opening 14 Decemeber 2007. Also exhibiting in The Project Room and collaborating with the duo will be Luc Price, a British born street artist whose tribal fury combined with photo realistic imagrey creates an impressive style of his own.

The differences in Hera's and Akut's ways of approaching art and the painting itself are vast. Akut started doing graffiti at the age of fourteen with no artistic background. The photorealism he spraypaints today is self-taught and needs a bundle of preparations consisting of a concept that has been mapped out on the computer, high resolution photo-material and a predefined assortment of aerosol paints. If this is all set, Akut patiently assembles his characters dot by dot with one eye on the concept, the other on the wall, while blending out everything else.

Hera in contrast thinks that preparing a piece is to handcuff yourself. It ties your perception to the scetch and allows no space for the influence of the surrounding atmosphere nor any immediate response to the wall as a very induvidual medium to paint on. Different from Akut who had experienced graffiti closely connected to the hiphop-culture, Hera just felt the urge to work big-dimensioned when she originally started to paint on walls in 2001. Therefore none of the unwritten rules and restrictions of the established graffiti scene had an impact on her work although another mental boundary did: As reaction to years of strict eductation of artistic techniques which Hera had received as a child, she today demands as much freedom as possible for intuition and spontaneity in a painting.