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The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Tag: Public art

It appears that sculptor Joe Reginella has once again erected a memorial statue marking a fictional occurrence in New York City. This time, it’s a story that purports that former Mayor Ed Koch sent wolves into the subways of the city to ward off graffiti artists during his tenure, and according to the Ed Koch Wolf Foundation (who supposedly put up the memorial), the creatures are still the reason behind missing tourists in the Big Apple.
The murals of Dimitris Taxis recall his experience in both comics and cinematography. The Poland-born, Athens-based artist has emerged as a force in public art for his distinct works, often depicting solitary scenes in a style not often seen on walls. Recent sites include Italy and his native Poland.
Paola Delfín’s riveting murals, though monochromatic, are teeming with life on walls across the world. The artist’s recent works, adorning structures in Belgium, Cuba, and Cayman Islands, move between eye-level and towering works, such as the The Crystal Ship piece shown above and below. The artist was born in Mexico City.
Anders Gjennestad’s illusionary painted public art often features his signature, monochromatic characters scaling structures across the globe. The artist uses shadows with his figures to play with depth, whether on eroding buildings or adorning newly constructed offices in Norway, Germany, and beyond. The artist’s practice also includes humanscale, gallery-based work.
Michael Johansson’s massive sculptures simulate the runners, sprues, and parts that comprise model kits through injection molding. The artist's public work, which are bronze and aluminum casts, have a particularly playful quality, whether simulating a "firefighter starter kit" or unassembled parts that would build a domestic living space.
New York sculptor Joe Reginella has fooled countless tourists with his statues scattered across the city, marking events that never actually happened. From a Staten Island Ferry encounter with an octopus to a New York Harbor UFO encounter, the artist’s scenarios use the convincing device of the memorial statue to relay his narratives.
"Carbon Copy" is a "glitch sculpture," a piece of public art in a Canadian parking lot that manipulates a a 1988 Plymouth Caravelle K-car. The sculpture comes from duo Caitlind r.c. Brown and Wayne Garrett, who were commissioned to create the piece for the Edmonton Brewery District.
Studio KCA used 5 tons of plastic waste pulled from the Pacific Ocean to construct a 4-story-tall whale, part of the 2018 Bruges Triennial. Dubbed "Skyscraper," the work is "a reminder of the 150,000,000 tons of plastic waste still swimming in our waters." Studio KCA worked with the Hawaii Wildlife Fund and the Surfrider Foundation Kaui Chapter to collect the waste used.
While sand art is a typical beachside art attraction, Daniel Popper crafts towering, shamanistic sculptures that appear to grow out of the earth. The artist’s sensibility calls back to both centuries-old traditions, contemporaries such as Ray Villafane, and his own, complex figurative style, comprised of thousands of pieces. The Cape Town native also specializes in puppetry, stage design, and other forms, which appear to play into his enormous public art installations. The top piece, “Ven a la Luz,” was created over a month for the Art With Me festival in Tulum, Mexico.
Puerto Rico-born muralist Bik Ismo is known for, among other imagery, crafting chrome figures and objects on walls across the world. Playing with “reflective” surfaces and light, the artist is able to create startling illusions. This sensibility has brought the artist’s hand to recent projects in Taiwan, Belgium, New Zealand, and Dubai.
The shadows on the sidewalks around Redwood City, Calif., have been doing strange things for the past year. That’s because Damon Belanger has been designing and painting fantastical faux-shadows that add creatures and other oddities under everyday objects. The effort is funded by the non-profit Redwood City Improvement Association, employing the San Carlos graphic artist to put his strange twist on cityscape.

BirdO

The week-long mural event Festival Inspire recently took over Moncton, Canada, adding 31 new murals to the city. The festival used both internationally known and local artists to create works on varied backdrops throughout the region. Among the names include were Canada's BirdO, Bordallo II of Portugal, Etien, Jon Fox, Jose di Gregorio, and several others.
Spanish artist Aryz has created massive public art across the world over the past few years. His style, a blend of pop art and vibrant surrealism, looms over city streets and waterways in recent stops in China, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The piece "Axis," above, part of the Back to School Project, was created three months ago in Chongqing in southwestern China.
Japanese artist Motoi Yamamoto's incredible installations made out of salt are entrancing to look at with their repetitive and meticulous patterns. Yamaoto has expressed that, in viewing his zen-like designs, he hopes others may find some point in their meditation for a healing or resolution of thought. His pure white crystalline works have been installed all over the world, most recently at the French castle of Aigues-Mortes.
A gigantic 20-foot tall inflatable refugee, which arrived in Copenhagen this week, is currently making headlines as it sails around the world. The sculpture is part of an effort by Belgian visual artist collective Schellekens & Peleman, who want to bring attention to the European refugee crisis- "a "symbol of the dehumanization of the refugee and the current refugee crisis happening in the world."
A new public art installation at Bristol University in England is garnering attention for its captivating use of wood samples from more than 10,000 tree species. Titled "Hollow", the installation is a collaboration by architects Zeller & Moye and artist Katie Paterson, who were inspired by the natural design of a forest canopy. Meant to represent the varying heights of trees in a forest, "Hollow" has an almost Tetris-like appearance, where the trees' different sizes, colors and textures come together to form a shape like a puzzle- in the artist's words, "a microcosmos of all the world's trees".
Brazilian twin artists Os Gemeos, Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo, were recently in Milan, Italy, working on a large mural installation for Pirelli HangarBicocca's new public art project, Outside the Cube. Their mural, titled "Efemero" (ephemeral) features one of their signature, colorful characters climbing up the hangar-shaped building, painted to look like a subway car. The site-specific piece also incorporates logos from international metro systems and personal messages.
A Milan, Italy based street artist known only as Biancoshock has been garnering some attention in the past few days for his curious new series of miniature rooms set within his local city streets. Underneath manhole covers and openings in the pavement, he has built elaborate and even luxurious interiors titled "Borderlife", a series while surreal and evoking images of Alice's tumbling rabbit-hole, takes its inspiration from a very real and serious issue.
When Alfred Hitchcock directed his classic film The Birds, he left open the question as to why the birds turned their fixation towards humanity. The mystery surrounding his film made it one his most chilling pieces of work, portraying a bird's-eye view of the world as if nature were judging us. Osaka based Japanese artist Wakako Kawakami takes a note from Hitchcock with her giant textile budgies that she installs in various locations. Their plush faces peer down on us from office windows and building entrances with empty eyes, compelling for their massive size and beautiful colors, but at the same time unnerving and mysterious.
We are living in a society where we are addicted to our cell phones and computers. Without even realizing it, the moment we stare at those screens, we forget about the people around us and the rest of the world. Los Angeles based Turkish artist Refik Anadol wants us to slow down and make technology into something we consciously see and feel. His digital installations that project light and sound correlate to our experience of the world through a virtual lens. His most recent installation, titled the "Infinity Room" at Zorlu Performing Art Center in Turkey, is a trippy, black and white installation that uses audio and visual stimulation to alter one's sense of the room. For this, he installed a cinema screen, onto which 3D kinetic animation based on algorithms was projected.
Brooklyn based sculptor Dustin Yellin (previously covered here) has earned acclaim for his monumental figures made of collaged materials inside of glass panels. The artist calls them "paintings-sculptures" for his combined use of drawings, paintings, magazine clippings, and three-dimensional works, weighing 12 tons at their largest. Inspired by 19th century taxonomic art, Yellin's work focuses on otherworldly mutations of living things, especially plants and insects. His recently completed "Psychogeographies" is now on permanent display at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC.
José Luis Torres is an Argentinean artist currently living in Quebec who builds largescale works out of salvaged objects. He's set up public art installations and sculptures all over the world, using everything from antique doors, window panes, to assemblages of brightly colored plastic as his materials. Often, his works have an overflowing effect as they burst from existing environments and architectural structures. His latest work entitled "Overflows" is a part of the 2015 Passages Insolites (Unusual Passages) event in Quebec City’s Old Port.
Visitors to Versailles Palace this summer will be greeted by a new exhibition of sculptures by the British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor. From June to October, six of his works are on view in the Jeu de Paume room in Versailles and the gardens, where they are already sparking debate. This is because one of his creations is a 197 foot long tunnel of steel symbolizing "the vagina of the queen who takes power". Some say the piece is a disfigurement to history, however it has nothing to do with Marie Antoinette. In fact, it was first realized in 2011 for the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan. Kapoor's bravado should come as no surprise. Known for his bold and large scale works, he is perhaps most recognized for his "Cloud Gate" in Chicago's Millennium Park and "Sky Mirror," exhibited at the Rockefeller Center in New York. Reinterpreted here, they are ambitious manipulations of form using reflective surfaces to being evocative of flesh and blood.
For five years in a row, the open air exhibition "Sculpture in the City" has brought some of the best contemporary artists to the public in London. Opening this week on July 9th, this year's installment will feature new works by Ekkehard Altenburger, Bruce Beasley, Adam Chodzko, Ceal Floyer, Laura Ford, Damien Hirst, Shan Hur, Folkert de Jong, Sigalit Landau, Kris Martin, Keita Miyazaki, Tomoaki Suzuki, Xavier Veilhan, and Ai Weiwei. The exhibit merges the new with the old as their works are set against the city's most historic landmarks. Take a look at more photos of Sculpture in the City 2015 as it comes together, after the jump.
After painting mostly around his homeland and some cities in Europe, Barcelona-based artist Pejac (covered here) recently took off on a tour around the Far East. During his trip, he stopped in Hong Kong, Seoul and Tokyo, leaving his mark in every city. From introducing new images and concepts to recreating some familiar ones, Pejac demonstrates his ability to work in different environments or mediums. Covering various subjects, mostly referring to the places he's visiting, the new works Pejac has created range from effective window-drawings to sculptural pieces.
Czech sculptor David Cerný has a reputation for being a "bad boy" artist. Although he rejects labels, he is most certainly a political artist, one whose works visually lash out against his government's hypocrisies. One of the first pieces to put him on the international map was a pink Soviet tank that served as a war memorial in Prague, followed by such sculptures as the Czech patron St. Wenceslas riding an inverted horse, and giant stainless steel babies crawling up the city's TV tower, to name a few. They are witty and bizarre but come from an intellectual place, even though the artist refuses to take himself too seriously. While he recognizes that his hometown in Prague is easily shocked, he does not create art for the sole purpose of shocking his audience.
The shape of a church is indefinitely sketched into the landscape in the latest project by architecture duo, Gijs Van Vaerenbergh. Comprised of Belgian architects Pieterjan Gijs and Arnout Van Vaerenbergh, their series of see-through churches, "Reading Between the Lines," are not intended to be functional as shelter. They are more like sculptures that borrow design inspiration from local churches' architecture in the area. See more after the jump!
Montreal-based artist Jason Botkin recently returned from Cancun, Mexico, where he created a series of murals and installations for the second annual Festival Internacional de Arte Publico, a week of art making that took place at the end of February. In collaboration with Jeremy Shantz, Botkin created a series of humorous, mask-like pieces with movable features that viewers could reconfigure a la Mr. Potato Head. Public engagement and collaboration are at the heart of Botkin's whimsical work. He is a co-founder of the collective En Masse, which invites its members to co-create sprawling monochromatic murals. Though Botkin's painting style has an instantly recognizable palette and texture, he has no problem adapting his aesthetic to work with that of other artists. Today we take a look at his pieces from FIAP as well as some other recent work.
While the collective mindset at some street art festivals seems to be "go big or go home," at NuArt Festival in Stavanger, Norway, the line-up of artists seemed more concerned with creating deliberately-placed works with an underlying political punch. That's not to say that a few mammoth pieces weren't painted. Polish duo Etam Cru (who are featured in our current issue, Hi-Fructose Vol. 32), true to their form, left behind a storybook-like mural that added color to the overcast landscape. The piece pictured a sleeping boy tucked into his bed with a can of spray paint sticking out from under the covers — a young artist in the making.
kastenation-793630948861433160_29782324 Brazilian twin artists Os Gemeos are always taking it up a notch. Last May, they adorned a Boeing 737 with the character-driven art to escort the Brazilian team to the FIFA World Cup (see our coverage here). In August, the brothers took on their biggest project to date: an enormous 75-foot-tall, 360-degree mural that measures a total of 23,500 square feet. Envisioned as a non-profit public artwork for the Vancouver Biennale, the piece is intended to leave a lasting mark on the Ocean Cement silos amid the industrial landscape of Vancouver's Granville Island. The project was funded via a crowd funding campaign and is included in the Vancouver Biennale's 2014-2016 programming as part of a series of large-scale public works they're calling an Open Air Museum. Granville Island attracts over 10 million annual visitors and the Biennale's organizers hope that the scale of this project will make it a major art destination for years to come.

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