Past
UK artist (www.mattsewell.co.uk) is a tree lover and master of organic, a neo-hippy ilustrator Matt Sewell that presents his premier solo exhibition in Spain right here in Subaquatica. Titled “The sun shines everyday” the artist describes the work he has elaborated for the ocassion this way: “Is about wanderings, fleeting thoughts, leaving home, migrating birds, castles in the sky, her face in the clouds. The beauty of the world and how nature can look after itself, tigers and crocodiles. The sun and Mother earth”
Proud son of the 70s Matt is known for his street work and his illustrations, with influences that come from European comic books from the end of the 20th century and his childhood in the countryside. The output is to no-one’s surprise a quite optimistic and colorful body of work whether if it’s out on the streets, his studio or commercial work as an illustrator.
With the ocassion of the publication of the book that originates from the project of the same name, we are hosting a short two week show with the touring art exhibition “A Nice Set” (www.aniceset.com) curated by Plus Et Plus in NY. The exhibition consist of a series of slipmats (those pieces used by DJs to cue their vinyls) customized by a superb selection of artist from all over the world: Build, Carlos “Mare 139″ Rodriguez, David Ellis, Ian “Swifty” Swift, Hort, Jeff Staple, Jeremyville, Luca Ionescu, Marc Atlan among others.
Choque Cultural is an art gallery that we feel close to in Subaquatuca since we happened to be in São Paulo exactly the day it opened in 2003, only a couple of months after Subaquatica had opened. Since then and due to the contacts we made back then and the huge amount of talent coming from that city we’ve showed work by many artist from that Brazillian megalopolis: Titi Freak, Stephan Doitschinoff, Flip, Herbert Baglione or Speto because they came by Madrid or in the form of prints, often edited by Choque cultural. Because the paulistan galley is also known for pioneering the edition of prints by young talented artists, many of them coming from the Graffiti, Street art of Tatoo scenes. In this way Choque Cultural has greatly contributed to the development of the careers of many emerging artists through their careful, honest and constant work channeling the creative energy of many, with respect for their freedom, no matter how subversive.
This short collective exhibition coincides in time with the greatest art fair in Spain: ARCO in Madrid, precisely when Brazil is the guest country. Because of this the show is in a way an Off ARCO absolutely unofficial project that brings the many visitors of the fair the chance to see the a sample of what’s happening in the outskirts of the art establishment in the giant south american country through the work of artists such as Speto, Titi Freak, Stephan Doitschinoff “Calma”, Onesto or Carlos Dias.
Derrick Hodgson (www.madreal.com) is a Toronto based artist and illustrator whose work is a clear example of the so called “character design” thing. His imagery is based on his own experiences growing up in a small rural community north of Toronto and relating these experiences to the expanding urban environment he finds himself in at present. His recent work deals with a theme of rural meets urban and the urge to gain control over our future in relation to an escalating loss of nature. In this work, complex social spaces are crowded with somewhat real and mutated characters. He has been working freelance with a wide range of clients for the past 9 years such as Nike (USA and Canadá), Sony Creative (Japan), 55DSL or Fox TV (USA) among many others and has participated in a number of solo and group shows in galleries worldwide from Denmark to Australia or Italy. This will be his first solo show in Spain and under the title “Heavy Stew”. In his own words: “in simple terms the concept of stewing is putting a bunch of ingredients in a pot and letting them cook for a long period of time… I do this with my drawings and characters… its a visual stew of line and colour”.
About the psicotropic universe that Pelucas spits wherever he goes we could go into infinite detail but basically what you see is what you get. The main characters of this particular film, apparently simple and childish, reflect a inner self that proceeds from the abyss of conscience in an endless battle against killer routine and hidden behind shines of fluorescent black. No one can remain unaltered when confronting the esquizo-frenetic world that emanates from Pelucas. Part of the most surreal collective “Los niños especialitos” alomg with his twin brother Tiñas, Nano4814 and a couple of other equally bizarre partners, Pelucas compiles the best from his latest creations in diverse media and techniques for this, his first solo exhibition in Madrid.
Rilla and Steve Alexander, members of Australian design and art collective Rinzen, expose their obsessions and share their secrets in Rinzen’s first show in Spain. Together they shed light on the shadows of an inner world inhabited by monsters and beasts, primitive actions and guilty thoughts. And, in a mark of their deep affection for Spanish art and culture, they explore the national animal, the bull - and its metamorphosis into that famous symbol of unconscious desire, the Minotaur. The series of watercolour and ink studies, continue experiments Rilla and Steve began in exhibitions in Hamburg (Helium Cowboy, 2005), Berlin (Neurotitan, 2006) and Portland (Compound Gallery, 2007).
Rinzen is best known for the collaborative approach of its members, forming as a result of their visual and audio remix project, RMX. Extending the concept for their 2001 book, the group invited over 30 international participants to sequentially rework digital art, in what has now become a common method of collaboration amongst graphic designers and illustrators (©¯RMX Extended Play©˜ published by Die Gestalten Verlag). Most recently the project has taken a hands-on turn, yielding a series of fabric toys which were made and remade as they were sent from country to country (©¯Neighbourhood©˜ published by Victionary 2006). Rinzen’s work, created both individually and as a collective, covers a wide-range of styles and techniques, often featuring utopian alternate realities, bold, geometric designs or intricate, hand drawn studies. Rinzen’s posters and album covers have been exhibited at the Louvre and their large scale artwork installed in Tokyo’s Zero Gate and Copenhagen’s
Hotel Fox. They recently designed the inaugural issue of Paul Pope’s Batman for DC Comics and graphics for a bicycle released by Japanese company Bebike. The five members of the group are currently based in Berlin, Brisbane,
Melbourne and New York.
More info here: www.rinzen.com
…and here: www.rmxxx.com
Maya Hayuk is a muralist, photographer, printmaker, designer, curator, player of records, writer, performer, collector, Barnstormer, painter, illustrator, videographer, documentarian and lover of life who’s lives in New York by way of San Francisco, Baltimore, Boston and Toronto.
Leaving no surface, discipline, or location untouched, Hayuk makes use of an unbounded and unpredictable matrix of sources, mediums, and styles. Her relationship to the images she invents is an intricate and complex free association and a perspicacious act of unfailingly putting all the parts together to make the whole. She employs intense yet pertinent colors, complex geometries, and fine lines in order to collect the constituents that make up her present and visceral world. Her obsession with symmetry and her collection of images of mandalas, playing cards, hexes, totem poles, Ukrainian Easter eggs, quilts and bandanas play out in works that espouse the traditional as well as the innovative. Maya Hayuk’s wild and unabated imagery may appear chaotic but she has mastered an exact and resolute practice. Hayuk also executes human-scaled designs like small run books and prints, skateboard decks, shoes, photo essays, t-shirts, buttons, group shows, mix tapes and smaller drawings and paintings.
Photographing musicians has fueled Hayuk’s livelihood for the last few years and she has enthusiastically designed and illustrated posters and record covers for Prefuse 73, Savath and Savalas, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Oakley Hall, Om, Home and Devendra Banhart. Also, under the moniker Open Arms, Hayuk has been making hilarious and poignant holiday tribute music videos with Home-guitarist Andrew Deutsch, including one for the garage rock band Awesome Color. Her penchant for music, coupled with the process of collaboration, is akin to musicians jamming. About these “killer jams” she says, “Collaborating with other artists is what I’d imagine playing in a band would be like.”
Hayuk continues to produce work that is social, dynamic and out there for anyone and everyone to take in and discover. She continuously gives herself over to places, people and projects in a true communal bohemian fashion, working collaboratively as well as in a reproducible way, in her murals and prints respectively. The collaborative projects and interactions that Hayuk has become increasingly known for have an impact in a productive way that a lot of contemporary or fashionable work completely lacks. Her instinctive large-scale paintings directly effect public spaces and are genuine interventions that enrich their environment. They are completed with the help of friends such as the Barnstormers collective, who’s work has gained international recognition. There is something very classic rock punk folk rainbow peace freak out about Maya Hayuk that is very hard to put a finger on, but really it’s all about love. As if kindled by her distinguishing heart-shaped insignia signature, Hayuk’s disposition and practice eschew unpleasantries and welcome the irony and satire of real life.
“The Future”, her show for Subaquatica, is all about utopic landscapes, both inward and outward. in a very positive, forward thinking and idealized idea of nature. The show will consist on a series of new drawings, screenprints and a few pieces on wood.
Check her website: www.mayahayuk.com
Bfree (www.bfreeone.com) is the artistic name of Merijn Hos, an Utrecht (The Netherlands) based artist/ illustrator. His work depicts a colorful world of characters that operate in different environments. There is a thin line between his purely free artwork and the illustration work that he is been known for doing for various clothing brands and magazines. In both situations he’s completely submerged in his own particular world full of long-legged characters with their crazy high heel shoes, freckles and hairdos. He is the almighty creator of this universe with the use of lots of different materials. What once started out on the streets with spraypaint, marker and posters now has evolved to big stuffed dolls, paintings on canvas, and drawings on paper. Bfree has already received a well deserved recognition and has done various exhibitions around The Netherlands and Europe after he graduated with a BFA in Illustration at The Utrecht School of Visual Arts in 2003. He also participated in the Dilly shows that the British artist PMH has organized in London and Barcelona during the last few years.
Asked to bring his talent to this shores for a show at Subaquatica the artist has chosen the title “I thought this was forever” because, as he says, “over the last years I noticed that everytime I was getting used to something and starting to get comfortable with it I end up getting bored and I feel the situation has to change again. There is always a couple of days that are perfect and I am thinking: ‘this is the life, this is forever’ but then I get bored again”. In this show at Subaquatica Bfree has tried to capture this feeling, amongst other subjects that are moving him lately, in the form framed drawings and paint work in various sizes. He also produced a t-shirt and a zine available especially designed for this show. You can learn more about his work by taking a look at this interview we did with him a while back for or website.
PMH is a restless character always behind some initiative where the individual talents of many international artists, most from the Street art scene, are combined in the form of a zine or collective show. He’s responsible for “The Dilly” zine and shows in London or Barcelona and one of the founders of the Finders Keepers collective-project with shows in Milán, Hamburg, London amd Barcelona. But PMH has participated in these and other collective projects (Urban Edge in Milan or Wooster Remixed in New York among others) also as an artist in his own right but it seems like his artwork has been somehow obscured by his role as a curator-promoter.
In Subaquatica we’ve been following for some time his work as an artist in the different collective shows where he’s participated, but also featured in books and magazines, or his commercial work for different brands and companies. We felt it was about time his work was presented on a solo show and were very happy to hear he felt the same way. The result is his first solo show ever, right here in Subaquatica and under the title “Peel Slowly and See”. His work is varied and he uses anything that grabs him at that particular time: watercolours, papermache, pen, paper collage and photography so the show is a combination of all those different techniques and approaches to his discourse.
Like most of his work, the name is a pop culture reference. The first Velvet Underground LP had “peel slowly and see” on the cover and last year PMH listened to the album every day on his way to work. The name isn’t just a ‘cool, hip’ reference, it’s a reference to his life, both literally and in meaning. PMH has been an artist for what seems like forever now, but this is his first ever solo show, and it’s been a long time coming. Many of his friends/peers have put on many shows, but he’s been happy, busy organizing those other projects but also working on his style, and now he’s ready to come out from the shadows with “Peel Slowly and See”, in his own words “an introduction to me, my world, my mindstate and my style… Some say you are what influences you… so some pieces here directly represent my influences: Wu Tang, the Red baron, cute girls or Black Sabbath to name a few. Each picture is there to be peeled. Yeah, you see the image, but look closer and theres references, in-jokes: Peel me/ my art slowly and youll see me more clearly.
If you are not familiar with PMH’s work check this interview we recently made with him for this same website right here.
Stephan Doitschinoff aka Calma is an illustrator, painter, street-artist… from São Paulo (Brazil) In the last few years he’s been particularly busy traveling to the US and Europe for shows and projects and his very peculiar and distinctive imagery, full of religious connotations and sentences in Latin is becoming known to an increasingly bigger audience around the globe. He has worked for clients such as MTV Brazil, Red Bull or music bands such as Saves the day. Recently he has also done a series of paintings for Sepultura’s last album and one full page of Juxtapoz magazine has featured one of his painting that was exhibited in BLK/MRKT gallery in California for a anniversary group show. This is his first solo show in Spain.
“Death is a Holiday” is a series of drawings and paintings that illustrate the outrageously attractive concept that death can treat us to a rest. Thrown in between worlds it becomes a holiday between lives. The concept is serious and sensitive but wildly ironic and the humour of the macabre eats away at the images on the paper. A play on words, this deathly “holy” day being the only ever chance in life, in the godliest sense of the matter to get the opportunity to meet your maker.
The pictures in this series take on a cyclic battle between Life and Death, life being hard work, and death also arriving as a timely holiday, an exotic destination worth it’s gold. Reaching into themes found within the depths of paganism and alchemy, the signature skulls are a reminder of human mortality and accumulation of knowledge, yet their subjects provoke a realisation of the indestructible and the elemental.
The figures in the portraits are seen in the midst of a vareity of visions of the afterlife, or just on the edge, one even holds a bottle of poison, their ticket to the ultimate destination. With this contemplation of death and the appeal of a holiday, it leaves the viewer wondering where they might be going.
Visit his website: http://www.stephandoit.com.br/
Ezba is one of the leading examples of a new generation of young urban artists in Madrid that combine their street work with their professional career in the worlds of illustration, graphic design or motion graphics. In particular Ezba has been busy lately, while working as a designer, in the field of engravings of different kind. Despite his exposure in international art books and magazines his show at Subaquatica will be his first solo exhibition after his participation in a number of collective shows. It will be an excellent opportunity to appreciate his latest developments in a range of different techniques on paper such as silk-screen prints, vynil, hand drawings… In this selection of his recent works a number of influences from music, movies, TV… will be clear beyond any particular stylistic or conceptual statement. The images in these pieces come from basic sketches and remain fresh while portraying not a particular style but a solid visual language that synthesizes and encodes different personal and professional experiences through the eyes of Ezba.
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Blu started out his artistic career without a well-defined artistic project, following his passion for drawings, Street art, particularly unauthorized, illegal art. His work is developed in two stages and two different spaces. It originates from sketches jotted down in sketchbook, which represent a diary as well as a skeleton draft for the second stage: the mural. The actual project starts in front of the building, with size and load bearing elements of the wall, in effort to identify an impossible combination between painting and surrounding architecture. He avail himself of the most traditional and essential painting tools: brushes, paint roller, one colour and black; he often use techniques drawn from scenography as well as long sticks, which act as supports when working on large surfaces. The language adopted is strictly based on drawings: it originated from comics and cartoons alike, although it is best and provisionally epitomized by urban Graffiti. The work remains on paper once the mural has disappeared or faded, when it has been taken down, covered or destroyed together with its supporting frame.
Blu works and lives in Bologna (Italy) and has prepared a series of previously unseen drawings for his show at Subaquatica, entitled “La nada” (”The nothingness”).
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Blu’s works can be seen on his site: www.blublu.org
Danny Sangra is a UK artist and graphic designer, originally from Leeds from where he moved to London to study at Central St Martins. He’s also a member of the Scrawl Collective of (mostly street) artists and A Minute Silence with whom he works for the fashion industry as a print and textile designer. He has done several solo shows and exhibited in Florence, Berlin and twice in Tokyo and has also worked as an illustrator and designer for magazines such as Jockey Slut, Blag, X-Ray or Sleazenation and companies like Sony, Orange Mobile, Beams Clothing, Bread & Butter, Virgin Records or Merlin Clothing among many others. And about his style, well, in his own words: “My Painting style has evolved to using geometric shapes and precise line work combined with organic structures. I paint freely moving in and out of styles depending on my mood. I prefer to paint spaces, so the paint has room to grow and takeover”.
“The Velvet King Overthrow” is the title of his show he prepared for Subaquatica where he shows brand new work silk screen patch work painting never shown before. It is the first series of his most recent explorations combining painting and silk screening.
More info on the artist here:
and here:
http://www.scrawlcollective.co.uk/danny.htm
Who is Sixeart?
Sixeart, as well as his origins and main references, comes from the 80’s and 90’s Barcelona Graffiti scene. However, during the last few years, his field of activity has opened and Sixeart has become progressively more professionalized expanding his creative work to paintings on canvas, illustration or sculpture as well as his recent collaborations with the fashion industry. This natural evolution, combined with a continued street activity, has made possible for the artist to particpate in many individual and collective art shows in different galleries and events. This exhibition in Subaquatica is, however, is first individual show in Madrid.
It’s now, when new techniques and forms of art in the streets, different from the classical Graffiti, has become a worldwide phenomenon, when Sixeart’s work seems to fit in with the current trends. But for those who have followed his work for some time now, it’s obvious that, despite its logical evolution, Sixeart’s work has never been too concerned with the latest hype and has always remained true to nothing but its own peculiar style while open to experimentation. His recurring characters, animals and children, have grown with the artist, defining a colorful but bittersweet universe, full of contrast. And only Sixeart knows how to get there and all we can hope for his that he keeps on bringing back those wonderful snapshots from his visits.
Text: Subaquatica.
Sixeart for Subaquatica: “Niños malos con flequillo” (Bad Kids with a Fringe, 2006).
For the past 4 years, I’ve been working on and off in different series of kids that I usually call “Bad Kids with a Fringe”. These “kids” have been to different places: A solo show with 25 paintings at the Laboratorio 22 Gallery, a 6 by 8 m mural painting at the La Santa Gallery, and more recently at the International BAC Festival (at the CCCB Art Center) with a 2 by 3 m painting, but always in Barcelona. In each one of these shows, the series has been evolving and this latest collection for Subaquatica is probably the best “kids” series that I’ve done so far.
“Niños malos con flequillo” comes from the inspiration that I get from the characters and night companions I’ve found in Barcelona intense nights. All of them have been recorded in my subconscious: Their faces, their fringes, those evil faces that actually hide a beautiful inner soul in all of them. Thus, this way, this series came to exist, through different techniques and approaches: Grafiiti, drawings or canvases.
Texto: Sixeart
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From 1/Dec/2005 to 2/Feb/2006. Opening Dec 1st 2005 19:30 h |
Louis Lambert “3ttman” and Guillaume Alby “Remed” have known each other since 1993, and share a common interest and aproach to painting. Some years later, in 1999, and under the joint name “Drive59”, they start to interact with each other and with the use of streets of their hometown of Lille (France) as a working medium for their art with home made stickers. From this experience 3ttman and Remed are born.
After that, each ones follows different paths: 3ttman moves to Madrid and works with silkscreen techniques and painting on canvas while Remed devotes himself to the always risky but addictive world of Graffiti between France and Belgium.
During the summer of 2005, while Remed was visiting Madrid, both artists explore again their own doubts, fears and fantasies and work together using many different techniques. both “classical” and “urban” such as painting on canvas, pencil, spray paint, markers, stencils… This allows a perfect mixture of both styles that meet and support each other. Remed tipographic elements contrast with 3ttman spontaneous strokes and the first clean icons appear side by side the second childish and ironic representions. With their mutual trust and understanding they can erase, confront and interact and understand each other in this joint effort
both in form and content and in their need to deal with the subjects that surround their lifes. Out of that a series of fresh, colorful, topical and modern canvases have emerged.
And most of all, 3ttman and Remed just hope to keep enjoying themselves and portrait that spirit in the joint and solo works, full of colour and life, that they have prepared for this show at Subaquatica.
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